Corpus-based Contrastive Analysis of Keywords and Collocations across Sister Specialized Subcorpora in the Maritime Transport Field

Abstract

This corpus-based study aims to identify the keywords and collocation strength (Gries, 2013) in different text types across sister specialized subcorpora in the maritime transport field. Within this English for Specific Purposes area, which has been given little attention to from a corpus linguistics approach, the contrastive analysis will be primarily intended to determine the frequency and coverage of register (Leech, 2001) and explore the terms' distinctiveness in each of the subcorpora under study despite their close ties in a shared semantic maritime field. The designed workplan for this empirical study relies on putting differences into perspective alongside similarities within the framework of cooccurrence frequency count data (Evert, 2005) where keyword extraction and collocation patterns for each separate subcorpus are allocated and mutually compared. Finally, outcomes obtained shall help us determine the text terminological coverage, the collocation strengths or other associative characteristics that can provide us with more reliable results, with a fuller picture of how the selected terms work and with useful insights into salient markers of Maritime English language.