A Corpus-based Study On Polysemy In Marine Engineering English

The Maritime English is generally regarded and widely used as a tool language in the shipping industry. Thus, the Maritime English is studied and researched by people both in the shipping companies and in the maritime universities. Polysemy refers to a phenomenon that one lexical unit may be associated with a whole range senses which are related to each other in a systematic way. It was first proposed by Breal, the founder of semantics in the1921. The study of polysemy has developed rapidly, under the framework of prototype theory in cognitive linguistics.In Marine Engineering English, the learners often encounter polysemy, which namely means the words have some well-known meanings in General English and also contain some senses for special purpose in Marine Engineering English. These polysemes often confuse the Maritime English learners. Therefore, the study concerns about the polysemes in the Marine Engineering English.This study is based on the self-built corpus, containing about1.6million words. The corpus is built on Marine Engineering English textbooks, test banks for Marine Engineering English examination and reading materials. In this research, an online corpus, British National Corpus is used to compare with the self-built corpus in order to find the differences of meanings, collocations, and colligations in both corpora. The results of the analysis show that:1. The meanings of the polysemes are different in Marine Engineering English Corpus and British National Corpus.2. The collocations of the polysemes are different in both corpora, which means the ploysemes co-occur with different words of high frequency in both corpora.3. There are differences existing in the colligation patterns of the polysemes in both corpora.4. The metaphor and metonymy can be applied for the polysemy teaching in Marine Engineering English.