Abstract: Unlike ordinary nouns, general nouns are a category of nouns with extensive referential meanings and special language-internal meaning properties. General nouns play an important role in creating textual cohesion and coherence as well as propelling discourse information development. Many studies in recent years have treated general nouns under different rubrics, along with different analytical approaches and methodologies. From various perspectives, the previous studies discuss the meanings, functions and categorizations of general nouns. This paper discusses their distinctive theoretical and methodological features, with a view to offering

implications for discourse analysis, information processing, language teaching and corpus studies.