A Corpus-based Study On Syntactic Complexity Of Nautical English

In the quantitative linguistic studies, the study of syntax is one of the important aspects. Since sentences are the key units of syntax, studies of syntax are mostly about sentences. In these studies, most of them are to study the length, frequency, complexity and the correlations of the inner constituents. This study employs the quantitative and qualitative methods to study about the characteristics of nautical English in syntactic complexity compared with general English.3000 sentences extracted from Nautical English Corpus (NEC) and Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus (LOB) referred as S-NEC and S-LOB separately are used in this study.The result of the study shows that there are some differences between nautical English and general English in syntactic complexity. From the aspect of production unit, the mean length of sentences and T-units of S-NEC are both shorter than those of S-LOB, except the mean length of clauses. From the aspect of sentence complexity ratio, S-NEC is less complex than S-LOB. From the aspect of subordination, the value of the four measures of syntactic complexity of S-NEC are all smaller than those of LOB. From the aspect of coordination, the numbers of coordinate phrases per clause and coordinate phrases per T-unit of S-NEC are both bigger than those of S-LOB. But the number of T-units per sentence of S-NEC is smaller than that of S-LOB. In terms of particular structures, the numbers of complex nominals per clause and per T-unit are both bigger than those of S-LOB, except that the number of verb phrases per T-unit is smaller than that of S-LOB. All these statistics show that the syntactic complexity of nautical English is less complex than general English. It prefers to use more phrases with more simple structures. Nautical English is a kind of professional English that belongs to the category of Scientific English. The content of English belonging to science and technology mostly is descriptive. It prefers to use simple sentences and structures to describe objective theories and facts, which results in the above characteristics of nautical English in syntactic complexity.