Hecho, idea, tema, and problema as shell nouns in a corpus of Spanish academic writing

Abstract

This exploratory research examines the use of four shell nouns (hecho ‘fact’, idea ‘idea’, problema ‘problem’, and tema ‘topic’) in written academic texts of the Corpus of Spanish Academic Language (CLAE). Texts were written by students taking undergraduate courses in the humanities. They come from both monolingual (UNAM, Mexico) and bilingual contexts (Davis, California). The monolingual context subcorpus has 225 000 tokens and the bilingual, nearly 600 000 tokens. Data extraction was carried out with corpus linguistics methods, techniques, and instruments. The results show a) differences in the distribution of shell noun frequencies (idea and tema are more frequently used by California  students; hecho, by Mexican students), b) lexico- grammatical patterns show a very high variability among both groups, and c) textual function is more widely used than semantic and cognitive functions. We showed that shell noun usage differs according to students’ proficiency in Spanish and the learning context. However, these differences do not imply correctness in written production, but are a matter of style and experience in writing academic texts.