A Corpus-based Comparative Study On Turn Verbs In MEC And BNC

For maritime English learners,a skill to read maritime documents and an ability to communicate in the maritime field is very important.Owing to the fact that vocabulary is still the biggest handicap to the comprehension and communication of maritime English,vocabulary study is still a crucial part in maritime English education.The English vocabulary is rich in verbs and the mastery of verbs has always been the key point of English study.With the data collected and processed by AntConc and SPSS,this thesis selects turn verbs,the subcategory of verbs as the study objects and is focusing on analyzing the distribution,collocation,colligation and semantic prosody of turn verbs such as become,turn,get and go in Maritime English Corpus(MEC)and British National Corpus(BNC).The study tries to figure out the differences and similarities of the use of turn verbs in the two corpora and shows the subtle difference between turn verbs.The research findings are:firstly,turn verbs are widely used but they are in low frequency in MEC.Secondly,there are much variation and deviation in the choice of collocates in MEC and BNC,Thirdly,the turn verbs in this research mainly have the colligation "V n.","V adj." and "VP n." pattern both in MEC and BNC.Lastly,become shows mixed semantic prosody in MEC while positive semantic prosody in BNC;get shows mixed semantic prosody in MEC while negative semantic prosody in BNC;turn has neutral semantic prosody while go have negative semantic prosody both in MEC and BNC.The speciality and particularity of maritime English are the reasons of the results.This research intends to make maritime English learners have a thorough understanding of the maritime vocabulary features and further throw a light on education of maritime English vocabulary.