A Corpus-based Analysis On Maritime Vocabulary In English Nautical Films

Maritime organizations and personnel use maritime English as a communication tool,which is characterized by extensive use of specialized terms,technical vocabulary,terminology,abbreviations and other idioms.The current reform of college English teaching highlights the importance of English for Specific Purpose.Vocabulary is the key to learning a foreign language.Therefore,this paper studies the maritime English vocabulary in nautical films as an effective multimedia resource for modern foreign language teaching,in order to contribute to the research and teaching of specialized English.This study selected 14 popular English nautical films scripts to build a English nautical film corpus(NFC).The International Maritime Dictionary(IMD)and the College English CET-6 are used as reference.Using AntConc,Gotagger and other software,this research is aimed to compare and analyze the distribution characteristics of maritime English vocabulary in English nautical movies,the collocation characteristics of high-frequency words and to conduct a comparative analysis of maritime English vocabulary in nautical film corpus to CET-6 to identify the shared vocabulary and analyze its characteristics,and produce the unshared wordlist to provide reference for maritime English learning and textbook writing.The findings of research are as follows:1)The analysis of overall lexical characteristics in English nautical films corpus shows that with 117679 tokens and 7706 types in total in NFC,the largest group is nouns,possessing 28.61%;followed by verb(15.81%),adjective(5.89%)and adverb(3.06%).It can be seen that nouns plays the most important roles in this particular register of maritime English.2)The ubiquitous collocation patterns of the nautical words in the NFC are:Noun+Noun,Verb+Noun,Verb+Preposition and Verb+Adjective.e.g.supply ship,drop ladder,sail away and Lay aloft.3)The largest group of shared words in both NFC and CET-6 is nouns,accounting for 63.48%,which is followed by verbs(20.00%)and adjectives(14.38%).