AN INVESTIGATION INTO A PEDAGOGIC CORPUS OF MARITIME ENGLISH (ME)

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AN INVESTIGATION INTO A PEDAGOGIC CORPUS OF
MARITIME ENGLISH (ME)

• m.reguzzoni_at_virgilio.it
• reguzzom_at_astom.ac.uk

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MARITIME ENGLISH sub-registers

• set languages (SeaSpeak and IMO Standard Phrases
  )
• shipbuilding,
• seamanship,
• cargo handling,
• meteorology and oceanography,
• marine engineering,
• electricity, electronics, automation,
• port operations,
• marine pollution,
• safety of life at sea,
• international rules and regulations,
• marine insurance,
• shipping, business transactions,
• catering and tourism.

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ME The State of the Art
very little, if any, known about ME

research almost non-existent
no field-specific corpora available
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Maritime English Pedagogic Corpus (MEPC)
materials/texts
selection of specific lexical fields and
sub-registers
language used in the relevant field literature
representative of the type of English used and
accepted as genuine in an educated discourse
community living and working in a maritime
environment outside the English-speaking
countries, possibly a sample of ELF
validated by Italian professionals working in the
maritime field
typical ESP rhetorical functions
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The software

• WinATA (Aston Text Analyser)
• FREQUENCY and RANGE (Heatley, Nation and Coxhead,
  2002)
• WordClassifier (Denies, Goethals and EET Project
  Team, 1996)

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Corpus statistics
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(No Transcript)
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Stages in the investigation

• Stage1
• Producing a frequency list
• Comparing the MEPC most frequent words with the
  ones from other lists
• Identifying the function words not/present in the
  corpus
• Finding the coverage of the most common words
• Stage 2
• Identifying the maritime lexical items in the
  corpus
• Analysing the main features of the field
  specific lexical items.
• Classifying the technical words

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The most and the least frequent words across
different lists

• The 50 most frequent words
• General Service List (GSL)
• adapted from West by Bauman (http//jbauman.com/g
  sl.html )
• Cambridge International Corpus (CIC)
• 330,000 words of written data
• The COBUILD Bank of English
• 196 million words of written corpus

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ME vocabulary

• Hardly unique per se
• Mainly general words taking on different
  meanings and roles through
• polysemy and homonymy
• compounding

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Polysemy and homonymy1/5th of all types

• GE/ME differences Shifts in
• meaning
• (bank, floor, air draught , port)
• grammatical functions
• adverbs or prepositions -gt adjectives
• from verbs -gt nouns
• (after) (bow?)

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Shifts

• In meaning
• bank
• - a financial institution
• - the bank of a river
• - a bank of fog
• - a row of objects (e.g. a bank of oars, a
  bank of tubes).
• floor
• - a horizontal subdivision in a building
• - a vertical plate in the ship bottom.
• air draught
• - a current of air
• - the maximum height of the ships parts
  above the water surface.
• port
• - an artificial harbour,
• - an opening in the hull
• - the left side of the ship.

• In grammatical functions
• bow
• GE
• - noun (a knot with two loops, a weapon or a
  device for playing a musical instrument)
• - verb (indicating a body motion)
• ME
• - noun (the fore end of a ship)
• after
• GE
• - time relater (preposition/adverb)
• ME
• - adjective (the after end of the ship).

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Compounding (1)Usual types of connection

• noun plus noun
• e.g. ballast water, radio officer
• present participle plus noun
• e.g. mooring ropes, navigating cadet
• past participle plus noun
• e.g. compressed air, I-shaped beam

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Compounding (2) Common semantic relationships
(Blakey, 1987 146)
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Compounding (3)

• adjectives
• (deep tank, double bottom, forecastle, parallel
  middle body, strong beam, upper deck)
• nominalised adjectives
• (deck longitudinals)
• adjectival compounds
• (oil tight, watertight)
• reverse combinations
• (depth moulded, length overall)
• ordinal numbers
• (first mate, third engineer)
• prepositions
• (tween deck, upkeep, overhaul)

• the names of seasons
• ( summer load line)
• proper nouns turned into common nouns
• (jacobs ladder, samson post)
• eponyms or names of inventors to describe a
  product
• (Diesel engine, Beaufort scale, Plimsoll marks)
• place names to indicate an important event or
  convention
• (York-Antwerp Convention, Florida Act)
• geographical names
• (North Atlantic loadline)

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Compounding (5) poly-words

• One word (bulkhead, shipowner)
• Spaces in between (water ballast, bracket
  floor)
• Hyphens (I-beam)
• Prepositions (round of deck, turn of the bilge,
  length between perpendiculars)
• Possessive case (Ships Cook)
• Combined devices (men-of-war)
• fixed collocations with specialized unitary
  meaning

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ME multi-word items- fixed collocations with
specialized unitary meaning -

• condense information (Hatch Brown,1995191)
• create new meanings different from the one of
  each of the parts making up a combination
  (Barlow,199612)
• create unique meanings
• are the only acceptable referential forms
  available to point to areas of experience shared
  by the target maritime community (there exist no
  other words to point to the concepts they
  represent)
• do not serve other frames of reference
• are to be considered as single words (though
  written with hyphens or with spaces in between)
• have stable relationships having frozen into
  fixed forms
• can be seen as extreme forms of fixed collocation
  (Becker, 1975 8 Schmitt and McCarthy, 199743)

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Other relevant lexical aspects

• clippings (bosun for boatswain, fcsl for
  forecastle),
• initialization (A.B.S.)
• acronyms (SOLAS Safety Of Life At Sea, MARPOL
  MARine POLlution).

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Metaphors

• Metaphorical use of animal names in fixed
  collocations with specialized unitary meaning
  
• (cats walk, dog watch, crows nest, donkeyman)
• Metaphorical use of the language in connection
  with the word ship
• (she/her -gtbackbone, ribs)

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Field-specific borrowings (Eckersley,
Eckersley, 1960 417-432 )

• captain, navy, officer (French)
• cargo, canoe, niña (Spanish)
• anchor (Greek)
• admiral (Arabic)
• yacht, buoy, hull, dock, cruise (Dutch)
• tornado, hurricane (Caribbean)
• tsunami (Japanese)

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ME lexical classification

• Few unique field specific lexical items
• Lexical items also belonging to other ESP fields
• Multi-word sense segments or compounds
• (common words occurring together to form
  unique field specific single meanings)
• Polysemes and homonyms
• (common words used with special unique
  meanings in the frame of reference)
• Function words and general service words

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THE PEDAGOGIC WASH-BACK

• greater attention to the most frequent and to the
  least frequent words in the texts
• a different approach in designing learning tasks
  
• sense-segment-based lexical activities
• matching old words to new meanings
• exploring the multiple meanings of words
• analysing and manipulating the different
  relationships and combinations

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Activity 1 Look at the following table and
decide what is the meaning of course in the
different instances
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Activity 2 Read the following examples and guess
the different meanings of the word current
in context. Then check by using a dictionary.

• Evaluate current, nearby port and hurricane haven
  locations that may be considered for tropical
  cyclone avoidance.
• Current and lighting are supplied by the
  generators.
• Winds of hurricane force opposing any ocean
  current can quickly create very steep, short
  period waves.
• Plot current/ forecast positions of all active/
  suspected tropical cyclone activity.
• The service speed as well as the optimum size of
  tanker is very much related to current market
  economics.
• The developing storm drifts westwards with the
  current of free air and it deviates from the
  equator after arriving at the western margin of
  the semi-permanent 'high'
• The current state of the environment is one of
  the most serious problems facing mankind today.

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Activity 3 Find the different uses and meanings
of the word after using a dictionary. Then read
the following bits of sentences and identify
the different meanings.
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Activity 4All the words listed below contain
ship, but there are two odd-words-out . Cross
them out and motivate your decision. Provide an
example for each word . Translate the words into
Italian.

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Activity 5 Identify the relationships in the
following compounds and fill in the table

• after peak tank
• cylinder cover
• salt water
• needle valve
• I-beam
• ship owner
• wheelhouse
• storeroom
• hatchway
• steam turbine
• water plant
• hand pump
• steam turbine
• air-cushion
• Beaufort wind scale
• port operations

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Activity 6 Form compounds out of the following
definitions

• a ship that was designed to carry containers
  ______________________________________________
• the chain of the anchor _______________________
  _______________________
• the room where the engines are located
  _______________________________________________
• an engine driven by steam _______________________
  ________________________
• an engine invented by Rudolf Diesel ______________
  _________________________________
• the tanks located in the fore peak ______________
  _________________________________
• the covers on the hatches ______________________
  _________________________
• a bulkhead made of steel _______________________
  ________________________
• the papers of the ship _________________________
  ______________________
• a bar shaped like the letter H __________________
  _____________________________

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Activity 7 Gapped compounds - Complete the
compound words in this passage.

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Task aiming at developing learner autonomy
(created with Word Classifier)

• Read the following lists of words. They are all
  the words (381) from the Module Basic Ship
  Terminology that you have studied. Their
  difficulty ranges from 0 (fairly common) to 5 (
  less common)
• Work on your own. Underline all the words that
  you recognize and whose meaning you can remember.
  Count them and see how good you are and how much
  you have learnt.
• Work with a partner and create as many compound
  words as you can.
• Form a group of four and compare your lists. If
  you like, you can turn this activity into a
  competition.
• (The winner is the team of 2 students who have
  produced more compound words. The group decides
  whether the words are correct or not and assigns
  the scores. If you do not manage to reach an
  agreement, ask your teacher)

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END

• References