Trends in Marine Environment Protection Through Keyness Analysis of the MARPOL Convention

Abstract

MARPOL, the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, is the most essential international marine environmental convention. It has been amended and revised through the years, providing crucial linguistic materials for diachronic studies. This study focuses on the trends of marine environment protection based on a self-compiled corpus, the Corpus of MARPOL Convention, covering the period from 1973 to 2019. By systematically exploring the diachronic changes of keyness characteristics, it aims to shed light on the salient trend features of marine environment protection. To this end, keywords and key clusters of each MARPOL file are extracted and explored to reveal the diachronic features of the MARPOL Convention. In addition, a domain-specific multi-word term list of the Corpus of MARPOL Convention is generated from a pedagogical view. The findings reveal the improvement and perfection of the MARPOL Convention and demonstrate its actions towards the international marine environmental issues through annual amendment. In addition, the expressions in the MARPOL Convention are becoming more unified, normative and precise. Also, it can be found that the focus of marine environment convention, to a certain extent, is corresponding to the awareness of the emergency of global environmental issues. On the whole, by providing new insights into the salient trend features of the MARPOL Convention, the study is of great significance to the understanding of the development of marine environment protection from linguistic perspectives. It also provides pedagogical implications for Maritime English users.