Corpus-based Lexical Study On Boeing's And Airbus' System Descriptions

This thesis is a survey of Civil Aviation English, an ESP (English for Specific Purpose) English, especially with the highlight on the lexical characteristics of the professional language used in the two major aircraft systems, Boeing and Airbus. It is a corpus-based analysis of the lexical features in quantitative and qualitative perspectives. Just as Halliday says, the nature of language can find expression in actual language use. A corpus provides a large empirical database of discourse so that analyses are based on naturally occurring structures and patterns of language use rather than intuitions or perceptions. Due to the lack of any existing corpus, a mini-corpus—aircraft system description corpus (a sub-corpus of Civil Aviation English Corpus—CAEC), has been compiled to conduct the research. With the assistance of statistical package and computer programs, three aspects of lexicon (namely frequency, keyword, nominalization) are investigated. In the course of investigation, the three aspects are analyzed in comparison with those of the other six corpora:BNC, Brown, Birmingham, LLC (London-Lund Corpus),JDEST and CLEC. The findings of this study in general justify previous descriptions in this field.It is hoped that the findings of the current study will be of some help toward a better understanding and easier mastery of the target language by the students and personnel related to this field. It is also hoped that the research will be helpful for the design of best possible teaching materials and activities to help students comprehend and produce the target language appropriately.