A Corpus-based Study On Key Words Of GESAMP Reports

Based on the systematic investigations arranged by the international organizations responsible to the maritime affairs,GESAMP Reports are regarded as the representative of maritime environmental articles,which serve as a branch of Maritime English and are received increasing attention to the ESP researchers.Aimed at GESAMP Reports,based on the theories on corpus linguistics as well as the relative theories on keywords,this thesis is intended to study the basic characteristics,dispersion characteristics as well as the collocation characteristics of the keywords.With the software WordSmith,the analysis procedure applies the corpus-based methodology and combines the quantitative approach and qualitative approach.The keywords are acquired with a comparison between target corpus and reference corpus.The target corpus is built manually with original GESAMP Reports,while the reference corpus consists of BROWN and LOB.With the relative theories,the analysis of the keywords is conducted in view of the classifications of keywords-positive keywords and negative keywords,shared keywords and peculiar keywords.On the basis of the keyness values as well as other statistics,the analysis of the keywords is accomplished in different aspects.The findings of the present study are as follows:1)The majority of the keywords in target corpus are peculiar words,with a small proportion of shared words.Among shared words,the majority fall into lexical category or open class,with a small proportion of functional words.The shared words are of general meanings.Among peculiar words,all of them fall into lexical category or open class,with no proportion of functional words.Compared to general English articles,the peculiar words of maritime texts are mainly of maritime-related meanings or environmental-related meanings.What’ s more,a number of proper nouns and abbreviations are among the peculiar words.2)The distributions of shared words are more even,while the distributions of peculiar words are more concentrated.What’s more,the shared words are distributed more evenly in target corpus than in reference corpus.3)The lexical collocates of peculiar words are all of essential maritime-related or environmental-related meanings while for shared words,their lexical collocates are of general meanings.The lexical collocates of peculiar words are more fixed and fewer than that of shared words.There are peculiar words with only one or two significant collocations.The functional collocates of both peculiar keywords and shared keywords occupy a large proportion in the amount.The study has pedagogical implication for maritime English teaching and learning,meanwhile,it can provide reference to translation on maritime environmental field.