Mental Representation and Expansion of Meaning: A Study of Shell Nouns Used in British and Chinese Englishes

Extensively studied in, for example, Halliday and Hasan (1976), Hunston and Francis (2000), and Flowerdew and Forest (2015), shell nouns, albeit semantically non-specific, are widely used for text cohesion and meaning expansion. This paper investigates uses of shell nouns in a comparable corpus of English texts produced by British and Chinese writers for the media (Fang et al 2012). Observations will be reported and attempts made to highlight the underpinning differences in terms of mental representation of meaning across the two writer groups. Findings arising from the study will contribute towards research in world Englishes in the first place. The findings will additionally facilitate insightful discussions on the hypotactic-paratactic division between English and Chinese, which might be cited in support of the ‘shining through’ of L1 influences as a possible explanation for the observed differences.