This monograph presents a thorough empirical study of two grammatical construction types featuring an open-ended, functionally defined class of abstract nomina labeled ‘shell nouns’ by the author. The constructions they figure in are of the following kind: determiner (+ premodifier) + shell noun, followed by a complementing construction (with or without a linking copula) that can either be a that-clause, a wh-clause, or a to-infinitive, e.g., the fact (is) that I have no money. Conceptually, shell nouns are said to act as “shells for complex, proposition-like pieces of information” (4). To study these nouns in their linguistic environments, the author heavily relies on corpus-linguistic techniques, working on distributions of these highly frequent forms in the COBUILD corpus. The ultimate aim of this study is to propose a functional description of shell nouns, showing “how [they] provide speakers with powerful tools for the characterization, perspectivization, and indeed even manipulation, of their own and other speakers’ ideas” (8). What Schmid, then, specifically wants to add to these functional accounts is a conceptual component, one that would explain the versatility of these nominals in function of their capacities to relate to complex (discursive) information, mostly of a propositional type, preceding or following the noun in question, as well as to characterize that information, i.e., to interpret it – whether ‘truthfully’ or not. In particular, the cognitive orientation of this study is most noticeable in its attempt to propose a process-oriented explanation of the relation between shell nouns and their content clauses, which is assumed to help the hearer keep (given) information active throughout a stretch of discourse, or to reactivate it later on in the discursive flow. The classification of shell nouns proffered in the introduction structures the book as a whole. Following part one (“Foundations”), which deals with the theoretical, definitional, and methodological perspectives of this study, part two (“The use of shell nouns”) provides a detailed description of which abstracta are actually used as shell nouns and adds a typology of different kinds of shell-content complexes. After introducing, in chapter 6 (“Describing shell-noun uses”), some linguistic tools needed for the ensuing corpus analysis, the author proceeds to discuss shell nouns in terms of their ‘factual’, ‘linguistic’, ‘mental’, ‘modal’, ‘eventive’, and ‘circumstantial’ uses (chapters 7 to 12). Finally, part three, “Functions of shell nouns”, focuses on the functional-pragmatic motivations for using shell nouns. These chapters construe the functions of shell nouns with respect to their semantic (15), rhetorical/textual (16), and cognitive (17) properties, respectively. A conclusion (chapter 18) closes off the discussion, followed by an appendix containing the corpus data (frequencies) for 670 shell nouns in a host of syntactic environments. The book ends with two indexes, one of the concrete shell nouns featuring in this study and another of subjects.