EXPLORING SHELL NOUNS IN ANGELOU AND BHUTTO’S AUTOBIOGRAPHIES: A COMPARATIVE CORPUS-BASED STUDY

Abstract

This study aims to explore shell nouns in two autobiographies of Benazir Bhutto (1988), and of Maya Angelou (1969). The purpose of this research is to conduct analysis of each type of shell nouns with reference to their lexico-grammatical patterns and functions in both autobiographies. Quantitative analysis, to determine frequency of each shell noun and its lexico-grammatical patterns, is utilized by using the Antconc software (3.4.4.). Qualitative analysis, to examine their functions in both texts, is performed manually. The corpus for data was selected from 150 pages from each text. Schmid’s (2000) principles of shell nouns and their lexico-grammatical patterns, along with their functions, is used as a theoretical tool for this study. The findings and results revealed that the linguistic and circumstantial shell nouns are frequent in selected corpus of Bhutto’s autobiography (1988) while factual and circumstantial shell nouns are frequent in selected corpus of Angelou’s autobiography (1969). N+cl lexico-grammatical pattern is frequent in both autobiographies. N+be+cl pattern is more frequent in Angelou’s autobiography (1969) than in Bhutto’s autobiography (1988). Conclusively, shell nouns are genre specific and context dependent, it is shown that writers and other popular entities use shell nouns in their autobiographies to portray complex concepts in simple terms as Angelou (1969) portrayed her complex traumas of childhood in simple terms, like situation, etc. While Bhutto (1988) portrayed her ideas and perspectives in people’s mind through complex viewpoints in simpler terms.