A Corpus-based Study On Logical Conjunctions In Marine Engineering English Discourse

With the development of international shipping industries, marine engineering English plays a more and more important role in seafarers’daily work and the safety of shipping services. Therefore, marine engineering English has become a new field in recent studies. However, the previous studies of marine engineering English tend to focus on the lexicology, syntax; few efforts are made from the discourse level. As a result, this study is intended to explore marine engineering English from discourse level, expected to bring forth a positive effect on the teaching and learning of marine engineering English.Based on Halliday’s cohesion theory and functional grammar, with the help of computer and relevant software, this study is intended to explore the feature and distribution of logical conjunctions in marine engineering English through a comparative analysis of the three types of logical conjunctions, namely, elaborating conjunctions, extending conjunctions and enhancing conjunctions in MEE corpus and Brown corpus, as the reference of marine engineering English and general English respectively. The study is both quantitative and qualitative. The findings show that:in general, the logical conjunctions have a higher distribution in marine engineering English than in general English, which indicates that marine engineering English tends to depend on logical conjunctions in the cohesion of a discourse more than general English does. Specially, extending conjunctions and enhancing conjunctions are used more frequently in marine engineering English than in general English; on the contrary, elaborating conjunctions are less favored in marine engineering English than in general English. This suggests that there is a great association between the use of logical conjunctions and registers.It is hoped that the present study can help the seafarers understand and acquire the basic use of logical conjunctions in marine engineering English, and get better acquainted with the textual differences of different registers, thus improving seafarers’ English competence in the international seagoing services.