A Study Of Words Denoting Legal Documents In Maritime Treaty English

This thesis is to study words denoting legal documents in maritime treaty English. The study is focused on the etymology, general definition, legal definition, collocation and translation of these legal terms.The study is based on the statistical analysis of the frequencies and distributions of the legal terms in MTE, as compared with the other five corpora--NEC, MEE, T4, BROWNA and LOBA. SNOBOL4 and FoxPro programs have been applied to process the data provided in the six corpora, a non-parametric test, Chi-square test, has been applied to analyze the results obtained from the corpora.The study has proved that the frequencies of words denoting legal documents in MTE are much greater than in the other five corpora, and the distribution of these terms in MTE is different from that in the other five. These legal terms are mainly from Latin language, some of which are borrowed via French. The understanding and translation of the terms are largely dependent of context. Some terms are of single denotation in MTE with multiple denotations in the other corpora, while others are of multiple denotations in all the six corpora. Most of the terms are likely to be accompanied by post-positioned modifiers.