Quantitative Lexical Study On The Naval English

Naval English (hereinafter referred to as NE), is the English used in the navy-related area. It is a particular subset of English with unique features. Until now, the basic parameters of NE are not known. Based on the Naval English Corpus and British National Corpus, this quantitative linguistic research studies the following question:(1) What is the textual lexical density of the NE compared with that of the BNC?(2) What are the lexical coverage rates of CET wordlists over NE respectively?(3) What is the vocabulary growth pattern of NE?(4) What is the distribution pattern of hapax legomena in NE? The result reveals that:(1) The lexical density of the NE corpus is lower than that of BNC. Theoretically, for at least 95% of the 2,000-tokens NE texts, the vocabulary size ranges from 461 lemmas to 841 lemmas.(2) The coverage rate of CET wordlist over NE is much lower than that of BNC. Most of the high frequency lemmas are covered by CET wordlist. This shows that college English is very important for the understanding of NE text. However, it is far from enough. Therefore, a supplementary wordlist was added to increase the coverage rate to 95% by selecting words from the uncovered lemmas.(3) Compared with the growth rate of BNC, the slope of NE vocabulary growth curve is slightly small. The new vocabulary V is a rapid decreasing function of the sample size N with a long tail of the low values of V. It is also found that Brunet's model is robust in capturing the vocabulary growth of NE.(4) Hapax legomena accounts for 45.13% of the vocabulary size of NE and the number of hapaxes grows with the increase of the text length. The number of hapaxes for at least 95% of the NE texts with 2,000 word tokens ranges from 233 to 551.This research will help contribute to NE teaching and learning by providing statistics for course design, wordlist establishment as well as textbooks and dictionary compilation.