Analysis Of Conjuncts In Maritime English Discourses

One way to improve coherence and clarity in a written discourse is to signal logical relations between units of the discourse by means of conjuncts. A number of detailed and profound researches have been carried on by the explorers. However, as far as the author knows, all of which are about second language acquisition while the researches on the conjuncts in different styles of English are rare. Based on the results attained by the previous researches, this thesis intends to find out the characteristics of the use of conjuncts in Maritime English by employing the corpus-based research method to compare the conjuncts in Maritime English corpus and in general English corpus.The objects of this thesis are the 108 conjuncts generalized by Biber et al. (2000). The retrieval of these conjuncts in the two corpora comes with the differences of the two styles of English in terms of lexical density, lexical frequency, positional distribution and semantic distribution in using conjuncts. Based on the results of the study, the author further explores the possible causes of these differences and analyzes their effects on Maritime English teaching and learning.The results show that, in the study of lexical density, the conjuncts in Maritime English are fewer than they are in general English; in lexical frequency study, both depend heavily on the top ten conjuncts, but the conjuncts in Maritime English are incompact and the top ten words in two corpora are different. The study of the positional distribution shows that the medial conjuncts in Maritime English discourses take a much high percentage while the ones in final place are comparatively fewer. The study of semantic distribution demonstrates that the conjuncts in two corpora concentrate on the same four semantic categories, which are enumeration and addition, result/inference, contrast and concession and transition.These differences bring inconvenience to Maritime English study. Therefore, in the process of teaching, learning and using Maritime English, they should be paid more attention to, so that the use of conjuncts in Maritime English will be more accurate.