Central Determiners In Maritime Treaty English

Determiners are a set of closed-class items, which occur before the noun as head of the noun phrase. This term may be used to determine what kind of reference a noun phrase has: it is definite or indefinite, partitive or universal. This paper is mainly concerned with the distribution of determiners, esp. of central determiners in MTE. Several VC++ and SPSS programs are built to make statistical analysis and companson of the distributions of determiners between MTE and BROWNA, LOBA, MEE, NEC, or T4. The following conclusion is obtained: There is higher occurrence of predeterminers and lower occurrence of postdeterminers in MTE than in other corpus. Articles, as the typical central determiners, are extensively distributed in each corpus with the lowest occurrence of the indefinite article in MTE. Words which can be used as both pronouns and central determiners are frequently used in MTE as central determiners and in other corpus as pronouns.