A Corpus-Based Stylistic Analysis Of Louis Becke's Nautical Fictions

Nowadays,the focuses of most Maritime English studies are confined to treaties,documents and conventions,and primarily from the perspective of translation.Little academic energy has been spent on Maritime Literature.Louis Becke,acclaimed the best writer about the Pacific in Australia,is one of the most celebrated nautical fiction writers,whose works have drew enormous interest among readers worldwide.This study attempts to make a quantitative and qualitative analysis of his fictions with corpus-based approaches and stylistics theories applied.The study aims to figure out what features nautical fictions have in terms of lexicon,syntax and discourse based on ten of Louis Becke's most representative nautical fictions(LBNFC)and the reference corpus(BNFC)of general literary novels extracted from British National Corpus.The results are as follows:(1)On lexical level,though both Louis Becke's nautical fictions and general fictions employ high rate of normalization,nautical fictions have comparatively smaller lexical density,significantly shorter mean word length and a variety of nautical vocabulary.(2)On syntactic level,nautical fictions written by Louis Becke feature significantly longer mean sentence length combined with significantly abundant coordinators and subordinators.(3)On discourse level,Louis Becke uses significantly less personal reference and significantly more adverbial connectors in his nautical fictions.These features are probably determined by the innate theme of nautical fictions,the authorship of the writer and the literary effects the author wanted to achieve.