This paper used newspaper corpus and the novel corpus as a comparative group to examine the distributional features of the 'shell nouns' which has a dependent characteristic among korean nouns. The main purpose of this article is to describe the distributional characteristics of the shell nouns by genre based on the quantitative results of corpus. As a result, in the case of newspaper texts, the shell noun is mainly combined with the ‘-daneun’ clause to form the shell noun phrase. In the case of fiction, the combination with the '-daneun' clause is significantly lower than that of the newspaper, but the use of other shell noun phrases is high. The difference between these aspects is that there are shell noun phrases that a particular genre prefers and can be concluded that the functional part of the shell noun phrases is in contract with the nature of the genre. Therefore, this paper is meaningful in that it has further revealed that there is a preferred shell noun phrase by genre, and its function also varies depending on the genre.