The Quantitative Analysis Of Quantifiers In Marine Engineering English

This paper is a report of a computer-aided investigation into English quantifiers in Marine Engineering English. With an overview of the literature, especially the latest researches, the author has made systematic conclusions and summarization on English quantifiers and two categories of quantification - overt quantifiers and implicit quantification are generalized.With the assistance of Visual Basic program and the statistical methodology of chi-square test and Z-test, this paper is mainly concerned with statistical study on the proportion and distribution of quantifiers in MEE compared with other varieties of English ( BROWNA, LOBA, MEE, NEC and T4). The following conclusions are obtained: the overall proportion and distribution of quantifiers in MEE are similar to those of NEC, but significantly different from other four corpora. The frequency of overt quantification within limited universe of discourse is rather low in all the six corpora. The proportional quantification by comparative structures is commonly used in informal English, but some of structures are used in science and technology English with high proportions. The features of MEE in contrast with the other corpora in terms of the results based on Chi-square test and Z-test are analyzed in detail so as to interpret the stylistic characteristics of different varieties of English in accordance with different results on proportions and distributions.