A Study On Grammatical Cohesion In IMO Proposals

With the rapid development of international shipping industry, countries around the world are in urgent need to reach a consensus on the industry standards. The International Maritime Organization (IMO), a specialized agency of United Nations responsible for the safety and security of shipping and the prevention of marine pollution by ships, undertakes the mission to establish uniform standards. For this purpose, proposals are submitted to specialized committees for further discussion and then presented to the Assembly. Therefore, high-quality proposals play a leading role in the formation and revision of maritime conventions or regulations, which also accelerates the implementation of industry standards.However, there are few linguistic studies on IMO proposals in China. On the other hand, although cohesion theory is widely applied in discourse analysis of different genres, few studies stress on grammatical cohesion. Therefore, based on the theoretical framework of cohesion, this thesis mainly focuses on the grammatical cohesion in IMO proposals by comparison with general English texts with the assistance of computer software AntConc and SPSS. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are adopted.It is found that among four types of grammatical cohesive devices, reference is most frequently used in IMO proposals, followed by conjunction, ellipsis and substitution. By comparison, there is a significant difference in the use of grammatical cohesive devices between IMO proposals and general English texts. Though the overall frequency of use of grammatical cohesive devices in IMO proposals is lower, the frequency of use of conjunction is relatively higher than general English texts. It is hoped that the study could provide guidance for the writing and translation of IMO proposals and relevant research.