A Corpus-based Study On The Lexical Features Of Maritime English News

Nowadays, news plays an increasingly vital role in the acquisition of information and knowledge. Many maritime English learners and shipping related workers can be served with the latest information of the shipping industry and armed with related knowledge by reading maritime news. Nevertheless, due to the specialization of maritime English, maritime news readers are required to have enough knowledge concerning maritime English so as to better understand maritime news. There is no doubt that mastering maritime words is the basic step for maritime English learners.The present thesis constructs a Maritime English News Corpus drawn from the news of the official websites of the world leading classification societies, maritime organizations and shipping companies. Taking corpus BROWN as the reference corpus and with the aid of related computer programs, the thesis analyzes the features of maritime English news in aspects of vocabulary size, word length, word frequency, lexical density as well as lexical coverage. The results show that, compared with BROWN, the vocabulary size in Maritime English News Corpus is smaller, which proves that maritime English news is less diverse in the aspect of vocabulary than that of BROWN; in the aspect of word length, generally speaking, the word length of maritime English news is longer than that of BROWN; a comparison of the top100high frequency words in Maritime English News Corpus and BROWN indicates that more lexical words, especially those with distinctive maritime characteristics or abbreviations, appear in Maritime English News Corpus; as to the lexical density of the two corpora, the lexical density of Maritime English News Corpus is smaller than that of BROWN; in addition, the coverage rate of CET-4and CET-6wordlists over Maritime English News Corpus is lower than that of BROWN.The findings of the thesis can enlighten maritime English textbook compiling and maritime English vocabulary teaching and help maritime English learners know the lexical feature and better read and understand maritime English news.