A Study On Reporting Verbs In Marine Accident Reports

There are a large number of reporting verbs used in marine accident reports,but few research has been done on this aspect.This thesis explores reporting verbs in marine accident reports,aiming at analyzing the similarities and differences of the use of reporting verbs in marine accident reports and general English.According to the classifications of reporting verbs proposed by Thompson&Ye and Geis,this study adopts self-built MAR Corpus,BROWN Corpus as a reference corpus,to make a comparative study of reporting verbs in MAR Corpus and BROWN Corpus from frequency,semantic features and grammatical features,intending to reveal the differences of the use of reporting verbs in MAR Corpus and BROWN Corpus.The results shows that the high frequency of selected reporting verbs confirms that reporting verbs are widely distributed in MAR Corpus.Compared with BROWN Corpus,the types of reporting verbs in MAR Corpus are single.Among the 19 shared high-frequency reporting verbs,state,tell,say,indicate,note,find,announce,explain and add,these nine RVs used in the two Corpora have significant differences.The semantic studies displays that in terms of denotation,mental RVs rarely appeared in both corpora.Compared with BROWN Corpus,more textual verbs and less research verbs are used in MAR Corpus.In terms of affect,neutral RVs are the most commonly used verb in the two corpora,but compared with BROWN Corpus,more positive RVs and fewer negative RVs occurred in MAR Corpus.In terms of grammatical features,the past simple tense is the most commonly used tense and position of RVs in the beginning of the reported speech is the most common position distribution.The results of this study may help domestic maritime staff improve their understanding of reporting verbs in translation and writing of marine accident reports,and use reporting verbs more appropriately.