A Corpus-based Study On Keywords Of Maritime Press Briefings

On the basis of the three-stage coding of the Grounded Theory,the thesis aims to study the keywords of the IMO press briefings and their categories in order to further explore the focus of interests of the IMO,the work changes from 2010 to 2018 as well as the future tendency.At the same time,the thesis also provides reference and assistance for maritime English learners.The thesis takes the maritime press briefings on the official website as the research corpus,and the combination of BROWN,CLOB and BROWN corpus as the reference corpus.The keywords lists are primarily obtained by means of the Wordsmith and AntConc soffware.Then the categories of the keywords are classified through the cluster and concordance analyses on the basis of three-stage coding.The final part is the collocation analysis of the keywords in seven categories.The following conclusions are drawn:firstly,the keywords of the maritime press briefings are divided into three core categories on the basis of the three-stage coding which are Concern objects,Functions and Measures,including seven categories:Human elements,Shipping-related objects,Safety and security,Environment,Treaty instrument,Cooperation and Capacity building.Among them,Shipping-related objects,Treaty instrument and Cooperation are the long-standing focuses in recent years.For Functions,the IMO shifted from a focus on Safety and security to Environment from 2010 to 2018.Secondly,there are some differences on the adoption and meaning of keyword collocations between maritime English and general English.Meanwhile the collocations in maritime English are more professional.Thirdly,it is found out that the keywords collocations are different between two corpora.Furthermore,the collocations of keywords are more fixed and they often collocate with function words in Maritime English.This thesis possesses significant reference for individuals who are interested in the IMO and maritime English.It also provides international information reference and content supporting for policy decisions in relevant fields.