A Corpus-based Study Of Maritime English Synonyms

Different from General English,because of its particularity and specialization,maritime English has a vocabulary of subject-related characteristics.Synonyms in Maritime English constitute an important component of this feature.This study chooses maritime English synonyms as research objects and takes marine,maritime,nautical,navigational and seafaring as examples.It adopts a corpus-based method to quantitatively and qualitatively examine the five selected synonyms from four aspects:frequency,collocation,colligation and meaning.The major findings are as follows:Firstly,the frequency distributions of the five words are basically the same in maritime English and general English.Whether in BNC or MEC,the frequency of the word marine is the highest and that of the word seafaring is the lowest.Secondly,in spite of obvious differences in collocations between maritime English and general English,these synonyms are usually collocated with words of technical maritime senses.Thirdly,the most regular colligation pattern is "ADJ+N".However,maritime and marine also share the other common colligation patterns:"ADJ+ADJ","ADJ+PREP"and "ADJ+CONJ".Finally,in terms of meaning,the five synonyms have a considerable overlap in meaning.However,the meanings of these five synonyms are significantly different in terms of their referents.In terms of semantic prosody,the five synonyms have neutral semantic prosody.However,maritime and navigational have positive semantic prosody,while marine has negative semantic prosody.This study not only helps to enhance the understanding and differentiation of these five synonyms,but also provides an effective reference for future research of other maritime synonyms.