A Corpus-based Study Of Temporal Adverbials In Maritime Transportation English

Maritime Transportation English is increasingly important due to its close relationship with safety at sea and development of international trade. This paper mainly investigates the features of temporal adverbials based on the corpus sample of Maritime Transportation English. With the data collected and processed by the corpora softwares, such as AntConc, Foxpro and SPSS, this paper discusses in the perspectives of positions, constructions and semantic roles, hoping to provide a comprehensive introduction and description of application of temporal adverbials in Maritime Transportation English. The main research results are concluded as:1. Positions. In Maritime Transportation English, temporal adverbials prefer the position between the main verbs and the very end of the sentences. Besides, the initial, medial or end position is chosen in consideration of setting a time environment or sequence, cohesion and end weight principle. In the process of placing temporal adverbials, two special complicated occasions turn out, i.e. clustered and embedded temporal adverbials.2. Constructions. In Maritime Transportation English, among the three major types of constructions for temporal adverbials, time adverbs are most active in the position, and the most frequent adverbs are different from those from general English. Then, the time phrases are made up of three sub-categories:prepositional time phrases, noun time phrases and other time phrases. Noun time phrases include phrases omitting prepositions, this/that/previous/last/next/following phrases and each/every phrases, and other time phrases mainly include coordinations, end preposition-phrases and middle preposition-phrases. At last, the third construction, temporal clauses are divided into finite and non-finite subordinating clauses with similarities and differences in the common subordinators.3. Semantic roles. In Maritime Transportation English, Time-position adverbials account for the largest proportion among all the roles. Each of the four roles can be further divided into subclasses, which have obvious preference in application.