Lexico-semantic Associations in Maritime English as ESP: A Corpus-based Study

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the semantic association of maritime-specific lexis in a Maritime English corpus. Maritime-specific lexemes for analysis are chosen via keyword analysis, using the BNC Sampler as a reference corpus of general English. The paper focuses primarily on lexical collocates within a span of four words to the left and right of selected terms. An extensive review of each term in context is implemented to find the semantic relationship between the term and co-occurring words in the proximity. It was found that lexical collocates of selected terms fell into recurring semantic sets, though a large proportion of language with which the terms co-occurred did not fall into any of these groups. These recurring semantic sets of Maritime lexis, however, did not always appear in general English, demonstrating discrepant uses of land-born words and sea-born words. That is, lexical items in Maritime English appeared to be more collocationally fixed than their counterparts in general English, although individual terms revealed more or less unique relationships with a particular semantic set.