A Corpus-based Lexical Features Analysis Of Offshore Petroleum English

Oil and gas is the blood of the national economy, non-renewable energy and global strategic stock pile. The intensification of the global energy crisis prompts major oil companies a focus shift from land to ocean. Recent years, China has been stepping up efforts in offshore petroleum exploration and development with large quantity of manpower, material resources and financial resources. At the same time, the companies strengthen foreign communication and cooperation. From now on, more than100oil contracts and agreements have been signed with foreign companies. However, there are more difficulties and challenges in the field of offshore oil, comparing to land oil. Thus, it is necessary for technical specialists to read overseas documents especially in English and learn their advanced technologies, equipments and experience.Vocabulary is a very important part of English learning; also it is an essential part of language formation and development. For Chinese English learners, it is premised for them to grasp numerous words. A lexical study is not only helpful to the English learners to master and remember large amount of words, but also provide references to other categories study like translation and semantic study. Especially since specialized corpus should be of importance to the learners and researchers, many specialized corpus are compiled to study the lexical features of a certain field. The purpose of this study is to describe the lexical characteristics of offshore petroleum objectively and scientifically in both quantitative and qualitative way on the theoretical basis of corpus linguistic. Thus, OPE corpus with1million running words is built by selecting235texts containing English journal papers, conference papers and technical documents from the website of Society of Petroleum Engineers and The United States Patent and Trademark Office. Taking BNC as the reference corpus, the study explores the representative features of offshore petroleum English in function words, content words, frequency words and word formation of new words by analyzing lexical density, word length, and frequency of offshore petroleum English.There are altogether five chapters in this paper. Chapter One is a brief introduction, which states the background information, current situation and importance of offshore petroleum English lexical study. Study purpose, research approaches and layout of the paper are presented afterwards. Chapter Two mainly provides the theoretical background of this study, in which the introduction of corpus, corpus linguistic and corpus-based lexical study will be described in detail. Besides, the studies on offshore petroleum English at home and abroad are also introduced in this part. Some famous specialized corpora home and abroad are also will be introduced briefly. The methods employed in compiling the OPE corpus are depicted in Chapter Three, including the principles of compiling OPE corpus, the corpus design and the process of collecting and arranging the texts. Chapter Four is the major part of this paper, which includes the lexical description of offshore petroleum English based on the self-built corpus, including word length, word frequency, wordlist. and word-formation. The last chapter is mainly the summary of this study, as well as the pedagogical implications. contributions and limitations of this study.The result of research has shown that both lexical density and average word length of offshore petroleum corpus English are higher than that of BNC corpus, which indicates that offshore petroleum English is more complicated and professional; Compared to BNC, the offshore petroleum English uses less personal pronouns, because belonging to the category of scientific English, offshore petroleum English generally emphasizes objectivity and enjoy less personality. However, the use of function words such as articles and prepositions have few difference compared with BNC; Analysis of content words and keywords clearly reflects the professional features in the field of offshore petroleum English, so compared with general English, offshore petroleum English is more formal and more professional; By creating and observing the wordlist and keyword wordlist of offshore petroleum, the word formations of new words are analyzed and concluded. The creation of new words integrates various word formation methods, among which, compounding is frequently and simultaneously used with other methods. At last, by comparison and analysis the writer finds out the lexical features of offshore petroleum English, namely, including abundant words in other subjects, extensive use of short words and abbreviations, less use of pronouns, new words appearing thick and fast and so on. To some extent, this corpus-based lexical features analysis is instructive to offshore petroleum English learning, writing, teaching and other sludu.