Stylistic Features Of IMO Proposals

Shipping industry is booming with the rapid development of global economy, which presents more demands for unified standards in matters concerning maritime safety, efficiency of navigation and prevention and control of marine pollution. International Maritime Organization (IMO) has undertaken the responsibility of setting international standards to regulate shipping industry. To fulfill its responsibility, many proposals are submitted to IMO for further discussion on the development of standards. A well-written proposal can be reviewed and adopted quickly, which in turn accelerates the implementation of standards and improves the development of shipping industry.As one of the ten Category (a) council states, China’s influence upon international maritime affairs deepens further, and there is an urgent need for more proposals. However, because of people’s little concern for IMO proposal and its language, the quantity and quality of proposals submitted by China are severely affected. This study attempts to summarize the language features of IMO proposals under the framework of stylistics. In doing the research, a corpus-based approach is adopted and two corpora are established:corpus of IMO proposals and a reference corpus of equal size retrieved from British National Corpus.The results suggest that IMO proposals have significant stylistic features on three levels. On lexical level, first of all, English in IMO proposals is much denser than General English while the latter is more diversified than proposals. Second, the average word length of IMO proposals is longer than that of General English and nouns have an unusual condensation in the top100lemmas. On syntactic level, average sentence length of IMO proposals is much longer and declarative sentences are used extremely frequent. Of the declaratives, some commonly used clause patterns are introduced by words such as if and it. On textual level, above all, additive conjunctions and parallelism are frequently used. For discourse pattern, narrative pattern and problem-solution pattern are integrated into IMO proposals to make them more persuasive.It is hoped that this study could provide some suggestions for IMO proposal writing and translation.