html5-img
1 / 31

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

AN INVESTIGATION INTO A PEDAGOGIC CORPUS OF MARITIME ENGLISH (ME). m.reguzzoni@virgilio.it reguzzom@astom.ac.uk. MARITIME ENGLISH sub-registers. set languages ( SeaSpeak and IMO Standard Phrases ) shipbuilding, seamanship, cargo handling, meteorology and oceanography,

ira
Download Presentation

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

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. AN INVESTIGATION INTO A PEDAGOGIC CORPUS OF MARITIME ENGLISH (ME) m.reguzzoni@virgilio.it reguzzom@astom.ac.uk

  2. 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.

  3. ME: The State of the Art very little, if any, known about ME research almost non-existent no field-specific corpora available

  4. 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 Englishused 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

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

  6. Corpus statistics

  7. 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’

  8. The most and the least frequent wordsacross different lists The 50 most frequent words • General Service List (GSL) adapted from West by Bauman (http://jbauman.com/gsl.html ) • Cambridge International Corpus (CIC) 330,000 words of written data • The COBUILD Bank of English 196 million words of written corpus

  9. ME ‘vocabulary’ • Hardly unique ‘per se’ • Mainly ‘general words’ taking on different meanings and roles through: • polysemy and homonymy • compounding

  10. GE/ME differences – ‘Shifts’ in: meaning (bank, floor, air draught , port) grammatical functions: adverbs or prepositions -> adjectives from verbs -> nouns (after) (bow?) Polysemy and homonymy1/5th of all types

  11. 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 ship’s 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). ‘Shifts’

  12. 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

  13. Compounding (2) Common semantic relationships(Blakey, 1987: 146)

  14. 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 (jacob’s 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) Compounding (3)

  15. 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 (Ship’s Cook) • Combined devices (men-of-war) fixed collocations with ‘specialized unitary meaning’

  16. ME multi-word items- fixed collocationswith ‘specialized unitary meaning’ - • condense information (Hatch & Brown,1995:191) • create new meanings different from the one of each of the parts making up a combination (Barlow,1996:12) • 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, 1997:43)

  17. Other relevant lexical aspects • clippings (bosun for boatswain, f’c’sl for forecastle), • initialization (A.B.S.) • acronyms (SOLAS: Safety Of Life At Sea, MARPOL: MARine POLlution).

  18. Metaphors • Metaphorical use of animal names in fixed collocationswith ‘specialized unitary meaning’ (cat’s walk, dog watch, crow’s nest, donkeyman) • Metaphorical use of the language in connection with the word ‘ship’ (she/her ->backbone, ribs)

  19. 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)

  20. 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

  21. 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

  22. Activity 1: Look at the following table and decide what is the meaning of ‘course’ in the different instances

  23. 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.

  24. 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.

  25. Activity 4:All 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.

  26. 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

  27. 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 _______________________________________________

  28. Activity 7: ‘Gapped’ compounds - Complete the compound words in this passage.

  29. 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)

  30. END • References

More Related