| As a comprehensive regulatory framework for shipping, maritime conventions were developed and maintained by the International Maritime Organization to promote and protect the normal running of shipping business. The present study aims to explore the influence of key words for the contents and structure of maritime conventions, by investigating the distribution and collocation of key words in maritime conventions. This study focuses on the key words of several typical international maritime conventions. With the software WordSmith and Antconc toolkit as study tools, and the comparison between self-built corpora, Maritime Conventions Corpus(MCC) and the reference corpus which consists of BROWN & LOB, the key word list with key words of different degree was extracted. And the study is conducted in the methodology that combines both the quantitative approach and the qualitative one. The analysis of the key words for maritime conventions mainly focuses on the classification, distribution and collocation. In the study, the most representative key words have been taken as examples and unique features of them have been widely analyzed in comparison of two corpora.The findings of the present study are as follows:firstly, compared with standard English articles, the key words of maritime conventions are more maritime-related and legal-related. And most of them are nouns. In addition, there are also a certain number of archaic words, loan words and proper nouns; secondly, shared key words are mainly dominated by functional words, which decides the grammatical structure of sentences in maritime conventions, while peculiar words are dominated by lexical words, which decides the theme of a certain convention; thirdly, there are only a few key words distributed extensively, and most of the peculiar words intensely occur in maritime conventions; finally, both of the shared and peculiar key words show some tendencies in definite collocations, only that the collocations of the peculiar words are much fewer and more fixed. There are even some collocations of a few peculiar words only adopted under the certain contexts.The study has pedagogical implication for vocabulary learning of maritime English learners and teaching, which could improve the teaching quality and learning efficiency of students. Besides, it could further help the translation of maritime conventions. |
PDF Full Text Request