Shell-noun use in disciplinary student writing: A multifaceted analysis of problem and way in third-year undergraduate writing across three disciplines

Despite the growth of interest in the phenomenon of shell-nounhood in academic discourse, research has been primarily concerned with published research articles. This contrasts with the limited attention that it has received in the study of disciplinary student writing. This study explores discipline specificity in student writing through an in-depth multifaceted analysis of two frequent shell nouns, problem and way, in a sample of Year 3 undergraduate native writing from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus in three disciplines: Sociology, Business and Engineering. The lexical, syntactico-semantic and textual variables coded yield results that conform to the divide between the more experimental approach of the Physical Sciences and the more interpretive one taken in the Social Sciences. The examination of data in this paper helps identify distinctive disciplinary trends at various levels of linguistic analysis, many of which could then be further inspected through more automated pattern-driven investigations of larger datasets.