A Corpus Based Study On The Lexical Features Of International Ocean Shipping Conventions

In recent years, people all over the world have been witnessing the soaring of international shipping industry, and China is gradually becoming the center of ocean shipping of the world, enjoying an increasing communication with various areas and nations all over the world. In this case, it is of great significance to have a deep and thorough understanding of international ocean shipping conventions. These conventions are all written in English, which has been a barrier for people in this field in China. The author by himself built a corpus, named IOSLR, including several present international ocean shipping conventions, both home and abroad, and compare it with other two corpora:STCW, and a part of Brown corpus. Combing wordlist of CET-4 and CET-6 and utilizing relevant methods of natural language processing and statistical linguistics, the author will, in this paper, try to find out the lexical characteristics of international ocean shipping conventions by analyzing it mainly in the respect of word length, word frequency, lexical density, vocabulary size and lexical coverage.Research shows:1. In respect of vocabulary, Brown the largest, STCW coming next, IOSLR the least.2. The corpus STCW has the longest average word length while Brown the shortest, which can be concluded that, as a representative of common English corpus, Brown is the easiest to be read.3. The coverage rates of CET-4 word list over IOSLR and STCW are 80.31%and 90.52% respectively and 82.35% and 92.30% of that of CET-6. A conclusion could be drawn that, as long as the readers are in possession of CET-4 and CET-6 vocabulary, there is not much difficulty in reading maritime documents.