Quantitative Analysis Of Speech Act Verbs In Nautical English And General English

This thesis is to make a quantitative analysis of speech act verbs in nautical English and general English. The study is focused on the etymology, general definition, analysis of semantic components and syntactic frames of the SAVs with high frequencies in the NEC corpus.The study is based on the statistical analysis of the frequencies and distributions of the SAVs in NEC, as compared with the other two corporaæ¡žROWNA and LOBA. SNOBOL4 and FoxPro programs have been applied to process the data provided in the three corpora. Chi-square test has been applied to analyze the results obtained from the corpora.The study has proved that the frequencies and proportions SAVs occupy in the NEC corpus are lower than those in the other two corpora, and the distributions of the SAVs with high frequencies in NEC are different from those of these SAVs in the other two corpora. Most of the high frequency SAVs originate from Latin, few colloquial ones (necessarily used in nautical communication) are from Old English. Their high frequencies in NEC are mainly determined by their characteristics of formalness(except few colloquial SAVs), accuracy, reliability, authority or objectivity in legal documents, business letters or nautical communication. The characteristics of these high frequency SAVs can be accounted for by means of their origins, semantic components and syntactic frames.