Negation In Maritime Treaty English

This thesis is a corpus-based study. It aims at investigating the distribution and the characteristics of negation in Maritime Treaty English, in comparison with other registers of English, i.e. two sub-registers of maritime English represented by NEC and MEE, one sub-register of technical English represented by T4, and other two sub-registers of press reportage English represented by LOBA and BROWNA. In this paper, firstly, a detailed account of negation is presented in syntactic and semantic senses according to the broad views of grammarians. Secondly, the statistical data obtained by running the SNOBOL4 and SPSS programs are utilized to prove that, as far as the six corpora are concerned, more sentences in MTE take negative forms. Thirdly, the findings confirm that negation plays a more important part in MTE than it does in any other corpus, and some particular ways of negation utilized in MTE make it significantly different from other corpora in stylistic sense.