| This study is an attempt to find out the features of conjunctions in Maritime Law English. The author first sets up a Maritime Law English corpus including some major Maritime Laws, and then runs FoxPro. 6.0 to calculate the frequencies of the conjunctions which act as cohesive ties in legal texts. The author selects some conjunctions with comparatively higher frequencies in Maritime Law English and finds examples of these words to explain their usage in Maritime Law English. With the help of SPSS, the author tries to prove whether there is a significant difference in the conjunction between the Maritime Law English corpus and Brown corpus.The author finds out that the calculated value of most conjunctions is higher than the critical value in the Chi-square test, with merely a few exceptions. It proves that most conjunctions used in Maritime Law English have significant difference from those used in Brown corpus. Comparison shows that formal conjunctions are used more frequently in Maritime Law English, which proves the features of written legal English, that is, to express in a formal and precise way. The results also indicate that the additive conjunctions rank the first place in all the five types of conjunctions and are followed by conditional ones, because legal register tends to avoid anything or any situation that may lead to disputes. Causal and temporal conjunctions occur with lower frequencies. At last, the author makes some suggestions on how to apply these findings in the teaching and learning of Maritime Law English and also the translating of the Chinese Maritime Laws into English.
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