A Comparative Lexical Analysis Of British Maritime Law And General Legal English

Maritime Law occupies a rather important position within the whole legislation system.Great Britain is a nation of large maritime industry and powerful maritime force. She is a leader in the maritime legislative research and represents its development.In this thesis,Maritime Law in UK is chosen as the object.It is made comparison with the reference,which is composed of active acts promulgated in the recent two years regulating various aspects of life.Both of the corpora-CEML and CELA,are self-built. By a deliberately designed procedure,the corpora are processed by the software, generating a number of key words with keyness of different degrees.According to their keyness and other statistics,the words are categorized into groups and analyzed respectively.The analysis shows that key words of different categories tend to act and function in different ways in the articles of Maritime Law.The key words are analyzed in the aspects of their distribution,function,and importance.It is found that shared words mostly distribute evenly and peculiar words show obvious areas of congregation.In function,both of the categories show some tendency to collocate with definite neighbors,only that the neighbors of peculiar words are much fewer.There are even some words shifting only within several phrases.Finally,the two categories are of different importance in teaching and learning of the language or legal acts.The findings are aimed to contribute to the practical vocabulary teaching of Maritime Law English.