해사영어 : 코퍼스 기반 어휘 분석

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to compile a corpus of Maritime English and to describe some lexical features of Maritime English by comparing them with those of General English corpora such as LOB and BNC.

Corpus Linguistics is useful to illustrate real features of language use. In particular, specialized corpora in English can make a contribution to showing how a language is used in specific areas which are different from General English. In maritime communities, there have been communicative problems even though The International Maritime Organization (IMO) offered Standard Marine Communication Phrases (SMCP). Maritime English needs to be studied more systematically to help learners of Maritime English and seafarers who need Maritime English as English for Specific Purposes (ESP). However, a maritime English corpus has not been compiled yet, so it is necessary to compile a Maritime English corpus that offers more realistic language being used in the maritime community and to analyze the linguistic characteristics of Maritime English.

For the compilation of a Maritime English corpus, six kinds of maritime written texts such as journals, maritime law, media text, set language, textbooks and other documents were selected and about one million words were collected. Interviews and discussions with six professors who have been teaching Maritime English courses were implemented. Word frequencies in the Maritime English corpus were identified and then keywords were extracted by using a concordance, WordSmith 5.0.

The results of this study show that some lexical features of Maritime English are different from those of General English, so they can raise the awareness of lexical features of Maritime English. The word-list and keyword-list extracted from the Maritime English corpus (MECO) will be fundamental materials to help learners understand the frequent lexis in maritime texts and will be useful resources for maritime English textbooks. The high frequent word-list and the lexical characteristics of this study are expected to develop seafarers' and learners' communication skills.