The Comparison Of Nominal Groups In Maritime English And General English Under The Framework Of Cardiff Grammar

Cardiff Grammar is a new branch of Functional Grammar, which is put forward by Fawcett who holds the new ideas in determiners classification and heads in order to facilitate the computing generation of English. As a kind of English for special purpose, Maritime English is the working language in shipping industry, so how to polish their English skills is essential for the staff. Under the framework of Cardiff Grammar, based on corpora, this study compares and analyzes the nominal groups in general English and Maritime English from the view of quantities, structure and semantic meanings.Combining the quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis, through the comparison of the nominal groups in MEC and BNC, the conclusion is drawn:though the quantities of nominal groups in MEC and BNC have no great difference, the constituents of nominal group differ from each other, such as determiners and heads. In the two corpora, the eight categories of determiners classified by Fawcett, Deictic Determiner, Superlative Determiner, Ordinative Determiner, Quantifying Determiner, Partitive Determiner and Typic Determiner have significant difference in quantity, while Fractionative Determiner and Representational Determiner have no difference. Both Genitive Cluster and Co-ordinated Nominal Group as head have significant difference in quantity in MEC and BNC except Quality Group. Moreover, the structure tree used by Fawcett indicates that the inner structure of nominal group in MEC is more complicated than that in BNC.