Abstract :
Recent studies have examined shell noun use patterns. Recent studies examined novice writers' and students' use of the tool as opposed to professional writers. Studies have compared the writing of native and non-native English speakers. Yet, no studies have compared shell noun use in native English academic writers with native Farsi academic English writers. Our study fills in these gaps by specifically analyzing the structure and functions of shell nouns used by native English and native Farsi professional English writers. The software AntConc 4.2.2. was used in this study to identify how frequently and what range Hinkel’s shell noun list these two groups of writers had using the N-Gram option. Also, common shell noun structures introduced by Schmid (2000) were applied in the Cluster option of AntConc to find out how frequent these common patterns for shell nouns were. In addition, the three functions introduced by Schmid (2000) were also analyzed by the KWIC option in AntConc software to find these shell nouns in their contexts and the function of each one was analyzed based on the common lexico-grammatical patterns we have for each one. For the functions that shared the same common patterns, those words were analyzed individually to find out which function they performed. The results showed that both native Persian and English writers used more shell nouns in their texts compared to native English writers. However, native English writers were more likely to use various grammatical patterns compared to Farsi ones since the native Farsi ones repeated certain structures, whereas the range for native English writers was much higher. In terms of functions, both groups of writers applied the chosen shell nouns relatively the same with only slight differences in frequency; there were no major differences found. As a result, it was concluded that the native language of the writers does not play a significant role in how they use shell nouns; the main factor in the use of shell nouns is field, which was applied linguistics in this case.
