A Research On High-frequency Adverbs Based On Maritime Treaty English Corpus

Maritime treaty is one of the important methods to regulate and limit international shipping activities.In 1997,Dalian Maritime University established Maritime Treaty English corpus(MTE),which provided possibilities and convenience to the study of maritime treaty English.Adverb is one of the essential parts of English vocabulary,so it is of great value to do a research on the use of adverbs.Based on the theories of Biber,this paper discusses the general usage of adverbs in Maritime Treaty English corpus.By comparison with General English Corpus,this paper presents the general distribution and classifications of adverbs,the syntactic roles of adverbs in Maritime Treaty English corpus,and the collocations under different colligations of four high-frequency adverbs"so","only","out" and "also".Results of this paper are as follows:Compared with general English corpus,MTE witnesses more compounding adverbs among the 30 high-frequency adverbs;Adverbs in MTE show some features of legal English,such as the use of archaism and the high requirement of correctness.Secondly,adverbs in MTE are more often used as adverbials to modify verbs,but not used to modify adjectives or other adverbs.Compared with general English corpus,there is a significant difference in MTE in the syntactic role of adverbs as adverbials of verbs.In MTE,adverbs are more often used in simple present and with non-finite verbs.Finally,"so","only","out" and "also" are used in different ways in MTE and general English corpus."So" is used more in collocations with past participles;"only" is used more in passive voices;"out" is used more in the phrase "carry out";"also" often occurs with modal verbs.This paper will provide references and enlightenment to the study of adverbs in MTE and maritime English learning and teaching.