English Abstract Nouns As Conceptual Shells: Fr...

In their monograph, Signalling nouns in English, John Flowerdew and Richard W. Forest address a type of abstract noun known also as 'container noun' (Ven-dler 1967), 'carrier noun' (Ivanic 1991), 'unspecific' or 'metalanguage noun' (Winter 1992) or most notably 'shell noun' (Hunston and Francis 1999; Schmid 2000). However, despite considerable overlap between these categories and the class of signalling nouns (SNs), there is no complete extensional identity. As a list of illustrative examples, Flowerdew and Forest provide thing, fact, idea, argument, possibility, chapter and kind (p. 10; interestingly, though, kind does not occur as an SN in their corpus). The last two cannot be subsumed under the category of 'shell nouns' according to the definition provided by Schmid in his 2000 monograph, which may be regarded as the seminal publication on the subject. Schmid's account is based on the syntactic observation that some nouns are able to occur in patterns such as 'noun + postnominal that-clause' (e.g. the fact that I have no money) or 'noun + be + complementing that-clause' (e.g. The problem was that I have no money.) (cf. Schmid 2000: 3). As this does not work for words such as chapter and kind, these have been excluded from his class of shell nouns.

The SNs (in bold) refer to the underlined structures, which specify the lexical content of the nouns. The authors argue that "an SN does more than act as a 'shell' or 'carrier' of lexical specifics found in a content clause" (p. 7) because of its specific role in textual development. Therefore they reject a strictly syntax-based view on SNs and adopt a broader perspective, which is reflected in their definition of SNs as "abstract nouns which are non-specific in their meaning when considered in isolation and which are made specific in their meaning by reference to their linguistic context" (p. 1). Although this definition seems to intuitively capture the nature of nouns like fact in (1) and role in (2), the criterion of non-specificity is not a particularly convincing one. With regard to shell nouns, Schmid has already questioned "unspecificity" (2000: 74f.) as a valid semantic characteristic. For some very general, superordinate SNs/shell nouns such as fact or process, unspecificity might be reasonably postulated. For others, such as opportunity or strategy, it seems implausible to talk of unspecific meaning, as a glance at their dictionary definitions already reveals that paraphrasing their sense involves more than just one semantic dimension. Un- or non-specificity, therefore, needs to be qualified in order to be appropriately understood. In their chapter on semantic features of SNs, the authors refine their criterion of non-specificity by relating it to SNs exhibiting "both a constant (context-independent) and a variable (context-dependent) meaning" (p. 26). In examples (1) and (2), the latter is spelled out in the underlined structures. It is important to note, however, that in order for a noun token to be counted as an SN, the context-dependent part of its meaning has to be provided endophorically within the linguistic context and not - exophorically - via encyclopaedic knowledge or reference to other texts or prior discourses (p. 7f.).

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Ivanic, Roz. 1991. Nouns in search of a context: A study of nouns with both open- and closed-system characteristics. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 29(2): 93-114. Schmid, Hans-Jorg. 2000. English abstract nouns as conceptual shells. From corpus to cognition. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.

The nouns here are abstract entities: problem, outcome, issueand aim. They all refer to how something is viewed by the writer / speaker and clearly differ from more obviously simple content nouns such asapple, book, egg, fountain, generosity, happiness, joke, money and so on.

What these nouns are doing in the discourse is to encapsulate propositions in a way that determines how they are seen and how they should be understood. In more detail:

Firstly, shell nouns do not form a class of nouns which can be definitively and exhaustively listed (although we'll make an attempt at listing and categorising them later for teaching purposes). All shell nouns are able to be used, as it were , in non-shell functions when they simply represent an entity, abstract or concrete, to use rather old-fashioned terms, and are nouns like any other.

What identifies a shell noun is the function it performs in a discourse. Some nouns, usually like the ones exemplified above which represent rather loose abstract concepts, lend themselves to being the shell in which other stretches of discourse are understood and should be viewed.

So, for example, in:

The key principle at work here is the way that nouns can reify propositions, i.e., convert an abstract idea into a thing. The other term, used extensively for this behaviour of nouns, is that they provide the ability to hypostatize, i.e., treat or represent something abstract as a concrete reality.

Only nouns can do this, of course, because nouns are, along with verbs, the chief way in which any language represents reality.

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