A Corpus-based Study On Variation Of Ship Engineering English Terms

Terminology is the soul of domain-specific language. It is a fairly effective way to understand the general trend and development of certain subjects by examining terminology. Terminology extraction is a core technique in building a corpus. Currently, three approaches are predominant in term extraction studies. There are linguistic approach, statistical approach and hybrid approach. The existence of Term variation makes it more difficult to automatically extract term.There has been little study about variation of ship engineering English term. Therefore, with the aim to fill in the gap, This paper treats these standardized terms in the book Chinese Terms in Ship Engineering as original terms, and treats the terms which are different from the standardized term in Ship engineering English corpus as term variations. This paper studies characteristics of ship engineering English term variation and provides linguistic rules for terminology extraction. The present study will enrich the theory of terminology.For syntactic feature, the most frequent syntactic patterns for two-word term variation are NN+NN, JJ+NN VBG+NN. The most frequent syntactic patterns for three-word term variation are JJ+NN+NN, NN+NN+NN and NN+IN+NN.For morphological feature, the author studies the morphological feature of noun and adjective in morphological variation:The noun is derived from these words by different suffixes. The top three suffixes are-tion or-ion with proportion of36.4%,-er with35.8%and-ment with29.0%. The Adjective is derived from these words by adding different suffixes. The top three suffixes are-al with proportion of44.7%,-ing with36.1%and-ese with17.2%.For semantic feature, the author takes the semantic field theory as the theoretical foundation. There are different semantic variations:The synonymy variation takes up the first place with the proportion of78.9percent. The antonymy variation occupies the second place with the proportion of11.9percent. Hyponymy variation and meronomy variation have very low proportion.