A Corpus-Based Study On The Genitive Of Ship And Vessel In Nautical English

As it is known to all, the shipping industry has a long history in China, and nowadays it has become a global industry with the development of science and technology. Therefore to gain a mastery of the professional and theoretical knowledge about the maritime English as well as the martime spoken English is of great importance and urgency to seafarers and people who involve in shipping trade.The present paper researches on one of maritime English—nautical English, basing on self-built corpus to study and analyze the structures and features of the genitive of ship and vessel, as both of these two words which denote the floating unit are very common and useful to us, but are very difficult to distinguish one from the other. By tagging the corpus with the Gotagger software and outputting the quantative results through the MonoConc software, it is found that:1. Referring to the floating unit, ship and vessel own dramatically higher frequencies than other words denoting the floating unit.2. In the Nautical English Corpus, the distribution and frequency of the s-genitive are much lower than thoes of the of-phrase.3. Concerning the genitive of ship and vessel, there exist significant differences: compared with vessel, ship occurs more with s-genitive whereas the former applies more to of-phrase.4. With regards to all the semantic relations of genitive, such as possessive, subjective, objective, subjective compelement, partitive, descriptive and so on, these two words also have several differences. On one hand, with regards to s-genitive, there is no significant difference between ship and vessel for all those semantic relations. On the other hand, with respect to of-phrase, except that objective genitive of ship and that of vessel share almost the same proportions, all the rest types of genitives of ship and those of vessel has a sharply significant difference.Finally, this paper tends to provide some important and useful inspirations and advisory propositions to the study and learning of gentive in nautical English.