A Corpus-based Study On Syntactic Features Of MARPOL Convention

Marine pollution has already become one of the top 10 environmental problems endangering humans’survival and 35% marine pollution is from vessel-source. To protect environment, International Maritime Organization has adopted a series of maritime conventions. Among them, one of the most important conventions is the "International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships,1973 as modified by the Protocol of 1978" (MARPOL 73/78).Based on the sentence structures from Quirk and Bo Bing Grammar and corpus linguistic theory, the present study takes MARPOL Convention as the research data and Samples of Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English as the reference corpus. Combining qualitative and quantitative analysis, this study endeavors to analyze the syntactic features of MARPOL Convention in the aspects of sentence structures and voices, with the assistance of WordSmith, FoxPro, and SPSS in order to have a better understanding of the Convention.Results indicate that:(1) Average sentence length in MARPOL Convention is far longer than ordinary English; (2) Complex sentence is frequently used in MARPOL Convention; adverbial clause, attributive clause and objective clause are the top three of all subordinate clauses used in complex structures. In addition, condition clause and time clause are more common than others; there is an extensive use of’^clause’ and’where-clauses’. (3) Another prominent feature is frequent use of passive. There are three major passive constructions, that is, "be+ed-participle", "nominal group + ed-participle", and "attributive/adverbial clause+ed-participle" constructions. Among them, the first construction takes the leading position of all the passives, of which "shall+be+ed-participle" construction is the most frequently used in MARPOL Convention. (4) Finally, the main causes of the differences between two corpora are also introduced in the aspects of sentence length, structures and voices as well.