A Corpus-based Study On Passive Voice In International Maritime Conventions

As a significant long-lasting human activity, the international shipping business plays a critical role in globalization. To regulate the maritime activities, many countries have signed a series of International Maritime Conventions (IMCC) since 1924, including the Hague Rules, the Visby Rules, the Hamburg Rules, and the ineffective Rotterdam Rules. However, as typical maritime conventions, the high-frequent adoption of passives in IMCC creates obstacles for learners.Based on the theories from Quirk, Halliday and Langacker, taking IMCC as the research corpus and BROWN as the reference corpus, with the assistance of Antconc, Flash Text Divider and SPSS, while combining both qualitative and quantitative methods, the thesis endeavors to analyze the features of passive voice syntactically, functionally and cognitively.The study shows that IMCC is indicated with extensive features on three levels: (1) Syntactically, the passive voice is employed more frequently than active voice; semi-passives possess both verbal and active properties; most passive sentences omit the agents; some pseudo-passives are passive in form but active in meaning. (2) Functionally, the high ratio of passive adoption benefits from its realization of three meta-functions:firstly, to realize the ideational function and definite accurate terms; then, to ravel out the rights and responsibilities of related parties via interpersonal function; next, to create a coherent context and meet the textual function. (3) Cognitively, the study helps learners sensing the passive train of thoughts via causal event chain and energy transmission; meanwhile the prototypical and non-prototypical passives correspond to the central, semi/pseudo passives respectively, all of which emphasize the patient and its ultimate state.The passive-based research can help learners to grasp the IMCC, and provide reference for learning similar maritime conventions.