A Corpus-based Diachronic Study On The Language Of IMO Assembly Resolution

Social changes lead to the changes of language. At the same time, the diachronic study on language reflects the changes of society as well. So far, IMO has held Assemblies for 28 times since 1959 and issued 1,092 Resolutions. The Resolutions record the important events, decisions, the improvement of technology and other items. As significant maritime documents, Resolutions are the foundation of the formation of Maritime Convention. Its specific language environment condition and status make it worthy of being studied in the field of maritime English.This thesis is a diachronic study of language of IMO Assembly Resolution divided into 4 parts dependent upon dates of issue of important IMO regulations on the basis of corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics from lexical and syntactic perspectives via qualitative and quantitative methods. The research finds out that there are large differences between the language of Resolution and general English. And after comparing the language features of Resolution in 4 periods of time, it is conspicuous that there have been significant changes in the high-frequency words, low-frequency words, keywords, lexical density, main modal auxiliaries, and sentence length during the 55 years. The findings of the research reveal that the changes occurred in maritime field will influence the language changes of maritime documents, and the language changes reflect the developments and changes of society in return.The corpus-based diachronic analysis shows the objective existence of language changes and provides a reliable method for studying language changes. The study also provides suggestions for learners of maritime English to comprehend maritime documents, especially Resolution easily, and translate the maritime discourses accurately.