Chapterl Introduction

1.1 Background of Vocabulary Study

The status of vocabulary studies is shifted from a neglected area to the focus ofacademic researches. Schmitt and McCathy (2002:1) said, "mushrooming amount ofexperimental studies and pedagogical and reference material are being published inthe field of lexical study.’’ Since from late twentieth century, the study of vocabularyis one of the fastest growing areas in terms of output and publications. Maiguashca(1993) described the shift of vocabulary study as from being “poor relationship" oflanguage teaching in the 1960s and 1970s into a “guest of honor" status.Nowadays, there are three main branches concerning lexical research based ontheir contribution to the applied linguistic theory of vocabulary. Specifically speaking,they are vocabulary description, vocabulary acquisition and vocabulary pedagogy.Although vocabulary acquisition is a part of psychology of second language learningrelating to the mental process of learners and vocabulary pedagogy focuses on a more practical respect concerning teaching materials, and methods, yet there is no exacttheory or model in these two areas describing the linguistic data of vocabularysufficiently.Due to different research methods, vocabulary description can be divided intoquantitative lexical study and qualitative lexical study. Although in many occasionsthe qualitative method is able to accomplish the research objectives owing tointrospective approach, in many situations, large number of statistical data are neededto prove the scientific argumentation, and the method of quantitative lexical study isof great significance. Issues like word distribution, text length, wordlist coverage,vocabulary growth pattern are covered by the research on the quantitative lexicalstudy. Quantitative lexical study does not only provide scientific grounds forvocabulary description but reasonable basis of the applied linguistic theory onvocabulary.

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1.2 Objectives

When referring to quantitative lexical study, vocabulary growth pattern issignificant involving complicated research procedures. Many scholars have madeeffort to the study of textual vocabulary growth pattern, for instance, the study ofwhat the lexical growth pattern is in a certain text. Many characteristic constants andmodels have been put forward to describe the growth pattern of a certain text. On theinter-textual vocabulary growth pattern, there are some researches concerning thevocabulary growth curve for specific texts. For example. Fan (2006) testedinter-textual vocabulary growth for general written English with 1000000 words, andLi (2006) created a mathematic model of maritime engineering English. However, noreliable models have been examined to describe the inter-textual growth pattern formaritime convention English. Thus, this paper will emphasize on how the vocabularygrowth curve behaves in maritime convention English.

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Chapter 2 Literature Review

2.1 Characteristics of Maritime Convention English

Maritime convention English contains English written for legal purposesregulating the rules of shipping industry. Maritime convention English is a constituentof legal English. Thus, it has its apparent characteristics like legal English: precisionand formality. Specifically speaking, the lexical characteristics of maritimeconvention English are as follows: common words with uncommon meaning, wordsfrom old English and middle English，words and phrases from Latin, words from oldFrench, terms of art, words and expression with flexible meaning, rare adoption ofpronoun, modal auxiliaiy shall and coordination of synonyms or near-synonyms. Ofall these characteristics of maritime convention English, words from old English andmiddle English, words or phrases from Latin and words from old French arecomparatively significant owing to the historical development of laws.Old English period is considered to last from the time of the earliest writtenrecords, the seventh century, to the end of the eleventh century. The Middle Englishperiod is from 1100，the arrival of the Norman French, to 1500 (Wang, 2009，p: 218).Owning to the formality and precision of legal English, maritime convention Englishcontains large quantities of archaic compound words.

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2.2 History of Quantitative Lexical Description

The earliest quantitative lexical study dates back to twentieth century, when manylinguists and mathematicians tried to do research by combining linguistic theories andstatistical information and they also endeavored to find a more scientific basis ofteaching language, especially in lexical study. Nowadays, quantitative linguisticsdevelops into a scientific discipline with a wide range of application. Quantitativelinguistics mainly explores the word frequency distribution, relations of words ortheir collocations and the vocabulary growth in a text. Among the earliest researcheson words frequency distribution，the work of Zipf (1935, 1949) is of greatsignificance. His work indicated that the log frequencies against log ranks is a linearinverse relation. Later, other word frequency distributions based on Zipf s law wereproposed，like the beta distribution, the Waring distribution, and the lognormaldistribution. Carroll in 1967 raised that word frequency distribution enters into thezone of Large Number of Rare Events (LNRE). Because of large number of rarewords.

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Chapter 3 Data Collection and Processing........ 20

3.1 Corpus Description .......  20

3.1.1 The Maritime Convention Corpus....... 20

3.1.2 The British National Corpus....... 22

3.2 Tools for Data Processing....... 23

3.3 Procedures for Data Processing....... 24

Chapter 4 Results and Analysis .......26

4.1 General Comparison of Individual Texts between the Maritime.......26

4.2 Vocabulary Growth Models for the Maritime Convention Corpus .......37

Chapter 5 Conclusion .......50

5.1 Major Findings of this Research .......  50

5.2 Implications .......51

5.3 Suggestions for Further Study.......   51

Chapter 4 Results and Analysis

This chapter mainly deals with three issues concerning the vocabulary growthpatterns. Section 4.1 describes vocabulary size distributions of individual texts withroughly 1000 tokens, and the differences between the maritime convention Englishand general English from the BNC concerning type-token ratio. Section 4.2 exploresthe vocabulary growth pattern of the MCC and the goodness of fit for three powermathematic models cited in chapter Two (Brunet's model, Tuldava's model, Herdan'smodel). Section 4.3 is the general discussion of these three mathematic models. Figure 4.1 is the histograms of the textual vocabulary size of the 360 texts, andthe bell-shaped curve in figure 4.1 stands for the theoretical normal distribution curve.Most of these bars fall into the bell shape. Normal distribution is a very commonlyoccurring continuous probability distribution. It is of great significance in statisticaland lexical study and is always used in the natural and social science for real-valuedrandom variables. The bell shape is a typical normal distribution. Therefore, thevocabulary sizes of these texts from the maritime convention corpus are normallydistributed.

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Conclusion

This thesis studies the inter-textual vocabulary growth pattern for the maritimeconvention corpus of 372266 tokens. Some basic problems relating to theinter-textual vocabulary growth patterns of the maritime convention corpus are solved,specifically speaking，the distribution of textual vocabulary sizes, the difference ofTTR of 1000 tokens between the maritime convention corpus and the sample corpusfrom the BNC, and the test of mathematic models for vocabulary growth of themaritime convention corpus. The major findings are as follows;First, by examining 360 individual texts with about 1000 word tokens of themaritime convention corpus, it is found that the distributions of inter-textualvocabulary sizes are normal. The vocabulary sizes of individual texts of the Maritimeconvention corpus vary from 114 to 670 word types. The vocabulary sizes ofindividual texts of the sample corpus from the BNC are between 228 and 521 wordtypes. Most of the vocabulary sizes of the MCC are around 280 word types and thoseof the BNC are around 399 word types.

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Reference (omitted)