A Corpus-based Study On Nautical Lexis In Nautical Fiction

This study,by building the nautical fiction corpus(NFC)and,with the assistance of WordSmith5.0 and AntConc3.4 as well as programming languages Perl and Python3.0,conducted an analysis on the lexis in nautical fictions.Taking the International Maritime Dictionary(IMD)as a reference,this study extracted the shared nautical words in the NFC and the IMD,generating a shared nautical wordlist(SNWL),and conducted a lexical analysis on the SNWL.First and foremost,the focus of this study is the distribution of part-of-speech of nautical words in the SNWL;second,the frequency of nautical words in the SNWL were examined;in addition,the use of collocations of 7 high frequency words in the SNWL was studied;the last but not least,taking the subject English textbooks and the Standard Maritime Communication Phrases(SMCP)as references,the SNWL was divided into two categories:navigation-related words and engineering-related words.A further study on these two categories was carried out.The findings of this research are as follows:1)The SNWL has 2554 words in total.The largest group is noun,possessing 47.46%;followed by verb(32.95%),adjective(14.33%)and adverb(2.85%).2)The ubiquitous collocation patterns of the nautical words in the NFC are of Adjective + Noun and Verb + Noun,e.g.main mast and set mast;secondly,it is regular for the high frequency nautical words and functional words to form fixed phrases with typical nautical meanings,e.g.cast off;thirdly,common collocations of high frequency words possess specific maritime meanings,e.g.forecastle deck,the last,high frequency nautical words often form new compound nautical words with other words,e.g.anchor-watch.3)In the NFC,navigation-related words like steer and veer are more related to ship handling,entering and leaving harbor,deck watch in port and navigational watch at sea and words like distress and position are more related to distress traffic and VTS communication;engineering-related words like bearing and propeller are more related to the main propulsion diesel engine and the auxiliary machinery.