Shell noun use in MA thesis introductions in Applied Linguistics

There are two corpora. One was the “CMATIC” (short for “Chinese MA Theses Introduction Corpus”), comprising 100 introductions authored by Chinese postgraduate students majoring in applied linguistics, sourced from CNKI from 2020 to 2024. The other was the “AMATIC” (short for “American MA Theses Introduction Corpus”), which also consisted of 100 introductions of MA theses written by their American counterparts and were randomly selected from PQDT from 2020 to 2024. In addition, the two excel files extract the shell nouns from the two corpora and classify them according to their construction and functions.