Shell nouns : in a systemic functional linguistics perspective

Tese de doutoramento, Linguística (Análise do Discurso), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, 2015Shell nouns in a Systemic Functional Linguistics perspective. The aim of this thesis is to develop an account of shell nouns (Schmid, 2000) in a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) perspective. Using a parallel corpus comprising five article submissions by Portuguese academics in the field of economics and five published articles on comparable topics, the ideational, interpersonal and textual functions of shell nouns are tagged at the strata of the lexicogrammar and discourse semantics using Corpus Tool version 2.7.4 (O’Donnell, 2008). The systems networks used to tag the corpus are grounded in SFL theory. The analysis shows that shell nouns constitute an important systemic resource for the writers of research articles, who need to build an argument, positioning themselves and their study to convince the discourse community that their paper makes a contribution to knowledge in their disciplinary field. They enable a text to unfold by compacting information realised as a clause or more elsewhere in the text. Thus they can help scaffold a text through hyper-Themes, hyper-News and internal conjunction. At the stratum of the lexicogrammar, anaphorically referring nominal groups with a shell noun as Head often compose Theme, where they constitute a shared point of departure for the clause. In a decoding relational clause whose Process is realised by a verb such as reveal, confirm, or suggest, an anaphorically referring shell noun that construes Token helps to explicitly build the writer’s argument. Shell nouns that construe the field of research, such as results and findings are common in this function. Mental, linguistic and factual shell nouns contribute to construing dialogic position, and coupling between interpersonal systems and textual systems enables the writer to align the reader with certain positions and disalign with others. Although most shell nouns are not field specific, because they can project a figure that instantiates an entity, they contribute to construing field, for example instantiating entities as the object of study of the empirical research. The capacity of shell nouns to function as described above derives from their status as semiotic abstractions, which can refer to text as fact or report and are grammatical metaphors. They can be seen as lying at the intersection of modality and the logico-semantic relations of projection and expansion, brought into being by the semogenic process of nominalisation. The writers of the published articles and article submissions are found to use shell nouns in all of the functions above, but there are differences in the relative shares of the functions, which may affect reader reactions to the text