A Corpus-based Study On Lexical Features Of Marine Collision Accident Investigation Reports

Vocabulary is commonly defined as "All the words known and used by a particular person".A vocabulary serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge.Acquiring an extensive vocabulary is one of the large challenges in learning a second language.Vocabulary is central to English language teaching because without sufficient vocabulary students cannot understand others or express their own ideas.Considering the significance of vocabulary,this thesis characterizes the lexical features(lexical density,lexical coverage,lexical repetition rates and key words)based on the corpora of the MAIRs(Marine Accident Investigation Reports),MCAIRs(Marine Accident Collision Investigation Reports)and MEE(Marine Engineering English).Specifically,the following questions are addressed:1.What are the linguistic features of vocabulary in MCAIRs?(1)What are the features of lexical density of MCAIRs compared to other genres of maritime English?(2)What are the features of lexical coverage of MCAIRs?(3)How can we characterize the lexical repetition of MCAIRs?(4)What are the linguistic features of keywords of MCAIRs?The results indicate that the lexical density is not only related to the length of texts but also affected by other factors such as the universality of the themes and the vocabulary size in the texts.In the aspect of lexical coverage,the coverage rate of MAIR(0.1127)is lower than that of MEE(0.2263)which means that though the specialization level of MEE is lower,it has more vocabularies and themes.According tothe comparison of three corpora mentioned above,we extract the signal key words fromMCAIRs and make a word list to scientifically guide the reading and writing of marineaccident investigation reports.