A Study On Adjectival Postmodification In The SOLAS Convention

For a long time, the study on the International Maritime Conventions has raised the interest of many people in shipping circle. As a result, the study on translation, lexical change, nominal ization and cohesion in the International Maritime Conventions has attracted many scholars and people who are interested in the International Conventions in shipping industries and Maritime universities. As a part of the International Maritime Conventions, the SOLAS convention is of great significance for teaching and research. Therefore, this thesis will research on the SOLAS Convention. At the same time, with the high frequency use of nominal phrases used in the International Maritime Conventions and postmodifiers high frequently occurred, as the premodifiers and postmodifiers are two important constituents in noun phrases, this thesis mainly studies the postmodifiers, especially the adjectival postmodifiers.The data is constructed from the International Maritime Conventions book, containing over than200,000words. And in this thesis, BROWN corpus is used to compare with the self-made corpus so as to give the evidence to support the research processing.Formal linguists have made studies on the postmodifiers in English noun phrases. However, previous studies on the postmodifier of English nouns fail to provide systematic theoretical explanations to them from the same angle. This thesis tries to provide a systematic account of the postmodifiers from the perspective of Sub-categorization. Within the analysis process, some computational program and statistical software will be applied to present a scientific support.