A Quantitative Lexical Study On Marine Investigation Report

As the building block for a language, lexicon is of importance in English language acquisition. Marine Investigation Report, as an important part in maritime English, has its unique lexical features. Based on the self-built corpus of Marine Investigation Report, FLOB and JDEST, the present study explores the lexical features of marine investigation reports from the following four aspects, the distribution feature of high frequency words, the lexical complexity, the lexical density of each kind of lexical words and the inter-textual vocabulary growth pattern.With the aid of several suites of software and FoxPro programs, several findings are obtained.First of all, there are more lexical words in the top50high frequency wordlists of MIRC than FLOB and JDEST. According to the correlation matrix, we can infer that the top100high frequency words in MIRC, or even the top500high frequency words share little correlation with those of FLOB and JDEST.Secondly, the lexical complexity of MIRC is the highest.Thirdly, MIRC enjoys the highest lexical density of nouns, but the lowest lexical density of adverbs. FLOB has the highest lexical density of lexical verbs and adverbs. JDEST shows the highest lexical density of adjectives. Nouns in all the three corpora contribute the most to lexical density.Fourthly, the slope of the vocabulary growth curve of FLOB is the largest, while MIRC the smallest among the three. Conclusion can be drawn through the regression analysis by SPSS that the Brunet’s model can fit the Vocabulary Growth Curve of MIRC very well.The study has significance in maritime English teaching, English course design as well as dictionary compilation.