This research paper mainly discusses gender of English nouns and its corresponding issues. Gender in other Indo-European languages is a grammatical abstract notion, but English gender is a semantic concrete conception...This research paper mainly discusses gender of English nouns and its corresponding issues. Gender in other Indo-European languages is a grammatical abstract notion, but English gender is a semantic concrete conception. English nouns can be divided into four categories： masculine, feminine, common and neuter. Gender genre of an English noun involves the choice of a pronoun that is employed to substitute it. Gender of the pronoun should be identical with its referent. However, the rule may be broken under special conditions. English has lost most word-ending inflectional changes, including grammatical gender of nouns.展开更多
English gerund construction is a system composed of 3 variants, including "Gerund + Φ", "Gerund + of + NP", and "Gerund + NP". The noun and verb attributes of the 3 variants are recursiv...English gerund construction is a system composed of 3 variants, including "Gerund + Φ", "Gerund + of + NP", and "Gerund + NP". The noun and verb attributes of the 3 variants are recursive, and in theory their frequencies vary regularly in different styles. An abstract is placed before the beginning of an academic papers, which has the basic characteristics of conciseness and generalization, and has special requirements for the use of gerunds. The purpose of this study was to empirically explore the system of gerund construction in abstracts of natural science and social science papers, and to specifically explore the inherent characteristics of noun and verb properties of the 3 variants. For this purpose, two corpora were constructed, one is about abstracts of natural science papers, and the other is about abstracts of social science papers. Finally, the results of chi-square test showed that there was no significant difference in the frequencies of the 3 variants in the abstracts of natural science and social science papers, and the two corpora can be studied as a whole. In the combined corpus, there were significant differences in the frequencies of the 3 gerund variants. The frequencies of these 3 variants and their gerund properties showed a recursive change.展开更多
文摘This research paper mainly discusses gender of English nouns and its corresponding issues. Gender in other Indo-European languages is a grammatical abstract notion, but English gender is a semantic concrete conception. English nouns can be divided into four categories： masculine, feminine, common and neuter. Gender genre of an English noun involves the choice of a pronoun that is employed to substitute it. Gender of the pronoun should be identical with its referent. However, the rule may be broken under special conditions. English has lost most word-ending inflectional changes, including grammatical gender of nouns.
基金supported by the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Planning Fund of Ministry of Education for Western and Frontier Areas(14XJA740001)。
文摘English gerund construction is a system composed of 3 variants, including "Gerund + Φ", "Gerund + of + NP", and "Gerund + NP". The noun and verb attributes of the 3 variants are recursive, and in theory their frequencies vary regularly in different styles. An abstract is placed before the beginning of an academic papers, which has the basic characteristics of conciseness and generalization, and has special requirements for the use of gerunds. The purpose of this study was to empirically explore the system of gerund construction in abstracts of natural science and social science papers, and to specifically explore the inherent characteristics of noun and verb properties of the 3 variants. For this purpose, two corpora were constructed, one is about abstracts of natural science papers, and the other is about abstracts of social science papers. Finally, the results of chi-square test showed that there was no significant difference in the frequencies of the 3 variants in the abstracts of natural science and social science papers, and the two corpora can be studied as a whole. In the combined corpus, there were significant differences in the frequencies of the 3 gerund variants. The frequencies of these 3 variants and their gerund properties showed a recursive change.
