Inter-textual Lexical Repetition In Marine Engineering English

The present thesis is a corpus-based research that investigates the inter-textual lexical repetition in randomly sampled texts of the MEE Corpus. The data were collected and processed with a tailor-written computer programs in FoxPro, a data managing system. Four sets of random samples were drawn from the MEE Corpus, totaling 1,072,320 words. Some important characteristics of the textual lexical input distribution and inter-textual lexical repetition of MEE are revealed. The textual lexical input distribution and the inter-textual lexical repetition distribution are approximately normal. The lexical repetition rate between any two texts of similar sizes is very low. Of the cumulative inter-textual vocabulary produced by the samples of each set, a substantial portion is hapax legomena, and lemmas that have multiple inter-textual repetitions account for only a small percentage. Such inter-textual lexical repetition patterns are a factor in the lexical inadequacy commonly felt by the EFL learner.