A Corpus-based Study Of Maritime English Compounds

Compounds,with their varieties,are vital in lexical acquisition.With stronger human interaction and faster social development,there have been more and more compounds in English,including maritime English.Of all the studies on compounds in English,few has to do with the maritime English compounds.This corpus-based research explores maritime English compounds from 3 perspectives:the orthographic forms;the distribution of their POS and syntactic patterns;and their meaning interpretation.The main findings are as follows:Firstly,the maritime English shares with general English in terms of the orthographic forms of compounds,i.e.solid compounds,hyphenated compounds,and open compounds.The research reveals that the POS patterns of the three forms of compounds are not completely the same.There are six POS patterns in solid compounds(N+N,PREP+N,N+VING,ADJ+N,N+ADJ,and PERP+V),four in open compounds(N+N,VING+N,ADJ+N,and N+VING),seven in three-word compounds,and eleven in hyphenated compounds(N+N,VING+ N,N+VED,ADJ+ N,N+VING,V+N,N+ ADJ,PREP+N,V+ PREP,VED+ N,and N+V)Secondly,maritime English compounds have five main categories of syntactic patterns,namely restrictive relation(seaman),subject-predicative relation(fresh water),verb-object(shipbuilding),subject-object(steam engine),subject-verb(tugboat).The syntactic patterns of solid compounds,open compounds,and hyphenated compounds vary from 5 to 8Thirdly,in the aspect of meaning,most maritime English compounds are of endocentric construction,whose meaning can be interpreted from that of their components.Whereas the combination of the components of a few exocentric maritime compounds gives no hint of the meaning.In this case,the related cognitive theories are essential to explore their meanings based on the contextsThis thesis,conducive to enhance comprehension of maritime English compounds,provides an effective reference for maritime English teaching and learning as well as future research of English compounds in other registers.