A Corpus-based Study On Colligation Of High-frequency Verbs In English Marine Accident Investigation Reports

Colligation is "the grammatical company a word keeps and the positions it prefers" (Hoey,2000). It is an abstract description of word categories. Colligation indicates a word’s most typical grammatical behavior, containing a lexical item’s typical grammatical patterns. Because of this, lexical study should take colligation as an essential factor to consider. Further, colligation is a language point of English study, especially for the study of English for Specific Purposes (ESP).In recent years, marine accidents that happening around the world have always troubled maritime safety. Marine accident investigation reports provide professional suggestions and guidance to maritime safety, whose contents possess genuine language materials as well as specific words and expressions. Therefore, it is valuable to take marine accident investigation reports as good materials to study at the linguistic level.The present study is based on self-made corpus-Marine Accident Investigation Reports Corpus (MAIRC), taking part of British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. By comparing colligations of take, make and find in the two corpora, the study tries to discuss colligation features of high-frequency verbs in marine accident investigation reports (MAIR).The results show that:(1) There are three categories of verbs in high-frequency verb colligations; (2) Colligation patterns in MAIR, based on the investigations into the three lexical verbs, are fewer than those in General English; (3) The overused verb colligations in MAIR are generally less than three patterns; (4) Whether the colligations in the two corpora are significantly different or not in frequency, collocations revealing their specific characteristics vary in many aspects.The results intend to benefit Maritime English study and teaching, help marine investigators research and study foreign cases of accident investigation reports, as well as give suggestions to Chinese investigation organizations in reading and writing marine accident investigation reports.