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

"Lexical bundles are the recurrent sequences of word combination of three or more words." (Biber et al.2000), they are structural and semantic units, which are frequently occurred in the natural language and well reveal the language characteristics of a certain field, so they are the important materials for English language study, especially for the ESP (English for Special Purpose) study.This study is based on Maritime English corpus, adopting a corpus-based approach. By comparing Maritime English corpus with General English corpus, the study tries to find out the features of frequently used lexical bundles in Maritime English. The study includes (1) the patterns of frequency distribution of 3-6 word bundles in Maritime English; (2) the structural and functional features of the highly frequent four-word bundles in Maritime English; (3) the unique features of four-word bundles in Maritime English, by a comparison with those in General English.The results show that:(1) In Maritime English, lexical bundles occur frequently, and with the bundles become longer, the bundle types and their corresponding frequencies become lesser. (2) Most lexical bundles are incomplete structural units and bundles of a given length are incorporated into its corresponding longer ones. They are not idiomatic in meaning and the meaning of them is transparent. (3) The frequent four-word bundles in Maritime English cover 9 groups, and the noun and prepositional phrases take up 75%. (4) The frequent four-word bundles can be classified into three categories functionally:stance expressions, discourse organizers and referential expressions, among which, referential expressions take up 73%. (5) There are some unique features of lexical bundles used in Maritime English.The results are beneficial for the design of relevant Maritime English dictionary and teaching materials. On the other hand, the study will promote Maritime English teaching.