Manuela Reguzzoni
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‘AN INVESTIGATION INTO A PEDAGOGIC CORPUS OF MARITIME ENGLISH (ME)’
Manuela Reguzzoni
LEND Lingua e Nuova Didattica (Italy)
m.reguzzoni@virgilio.it
Abstract
Millions of people work in the maritime field worldwide and need a good knowledge of
what goes under the heading of Maritime English (ME). Research in this field is,
however, surprising limited. Teaching this complex field-specific language well is not
an easy task when you have to rely just on ‘impression’ of language details and your
intuitions are not supported by evidence compiled objectively.
The research described in this article was carried out to overcome this problem and
consisted in investigating the materials used to teach ME in an Italian Maritime
School
with the purpose of identifying the main lexical characteristics of the
language, finding the ‘right’ items to focus on and devising well-targeted learning
tasks
The corpus created by collecting the teaching materials in use in the school was tiny,
when compared to the huge corpora available today, though fairly representative of
the language used in the ME frame of reference.
The investigation, carried out with WinATA and other free tools as well as by hand,
was fairly complex. The analysis of the word frequency list produced did not yield the
expected results as it led to identify - beside function words, general service words,
‘technical words’ shared with other ESP fields - few ‘unique’ field-specific lexical
items. It was only by shifting the focus from lemma types and word families to
semantic analysis, word meaning and words in context that it was possible to realize
that the maritime field-specific lexis mainly consisted in a variety of multi-word sense
segments or compounds (‘common words’ occurring together to form unique ‘field
specific single meanings’), and polysemes and homonyms (‘common words’ used
with special ‘unique’ meanings in the frame of reference).
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The insight gained through the investigation was particularly useful for pedagogical
purposes as it led to design better targeted learning activities, thus reducing the
learners’ difficulties in building up their ME mental lexicon.
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Manuela Reguzzoni
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AN INVESTIGATION INTO A PEDAGOGIC CORPUS OF MARITIME ENGLISH (ME)
Manuela Reguzzoni
The present report describes a lexical investigation carried out, for pedagogical
purposes, into a small corpus of Maritime English. After providing some background
information on the Maritime English scenario, it illustrates the purpose of the
research, the procedure followed in the investigation, the results obtained, the
tentative conclusions reached and their pedagogical wash-back.
THE ME SCENARIO
When Maritime English (ME) is mentioned, people tend to envisage a ‘prescribed
code’ (Widdowson, 1983:29), something similar to Airspeak. ME, however, is an
umbrella term for the ‘Lingua Franca’ used onboard and ashore by people working in
the maritime field worldwide. It encompasses not only set languages – such as
Seaspeak and IMO Standard Phrases, which are only used in ship-to-ship, ship-toshore and shipboard communications - but also a wide variety of lexical fields, and
sub-registers, such as shipbuilding, seamanship, cargo handling, meteorology and
oceanography, marine engineering, electricity and electronics, automation, port
operations, marine pollution, safety of life at sea, international rules and regulations,
marine insurance, shipping, business transactions, catering and tourism.
Even if millions of people work in the ‘target discourse community’ and need a good
working knowledge of ME – i.e. the ability to understand and use a wide range of
lexical items belonging to different lexical areas - research in this fields is almost nonexistent and no field-specific corpora seem to be available. The only extensive
research work ever carried out was directed to produce Seaspeak and IMO Standard
Phrases, simplified set languages, which cover just a tiny sector of the varieties of
field-specific language that can be encountered on a workplace both onboard and
ashore.
THE INVESTIGATION: KEY ASPECTS
The purpose of the investigation
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In Italy, ME is taught at secondary level in a number of Maritime State Schools as
part of the school curriculum. Teaching this complex field-specific language well,
however, is not an easy task as very little is known about its characteristics.
Relying on ‘impression’ of language detail and on intuitions which are not supported
by evidence compiled objectively is not the best way of teaching. This is the reason
why I decided to carry out an investigation into the teaching materials used in my
school to identify the main lexical characteristics of the language I was exposing my
students to and find the ‘right’ lexical items to focus on when designing learning tasks
and activities.
The materials
The teaching materials used in my school consisted in reading texts covering a wide
selection of specific ‘lexical fields’ and sub-registers which had been assembled over
the years from different sources, allegedly with a care not to infringe any copyright
rules. They had been selected on the basis of their ‘fitness to the learning purpose’
(Hutchinson and Waters, 1987:159) and their conformity to acceptable language
standards, reflected the language used in the relevant field literature and showed the
typical ESP (English for Specific Purposes) rhetorical functions, i.e. describing,
defining, classifying, providing instruction and illustrating visual-verbal relations
(Trimble, 1985).
On the whole, the collection, validated by a number of Italian professionals working in
the maritime field, was representative of the type of ME accepted as ‘genuine’
(Widdowson, 1983:30) in an educated discourse community living and working in a
maritime environment outside the English-speaking countries and was, possibly, a
sample of ‘English as Lingua Franca' (ELF) - a form of English which is gaining
increasing recognition (Seildlhofer, 2004; Jenkins, 2004, 2005; Chrystal, 2003) though it did not appear to contain any ELF lexico-grammatical features.
The software
The programmes employed to analyse my ME pedagogic corpus (hereafter named
MEPC for brevity), were:
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WinATA (Aston Text Analyser), used to index the corpus, count and sort the
words, obtain a word frequency list, compare it with the General English
corpus included, identify ‘field-specific lexis’ and analyse selected collocations.

FREQUENCY and RANGE (Heatley, Nation and Coxhead, 2002), used to
investigate to what degree the MEPC incorporated the most common ‘general’
and ‘academic’ words’ in English.

WordClassifier (Denies, Goethals and EET Project Team, 1996), used to
check and compare results.
This software was fairly but not entirely adequate to the purpose and, consequently,
a large part of the research was also carried out by means of spreadsheets and by
hand.
The corpus
The MEPC was tiny when compared to the huge corpora available today as it
contained only 51,823 'running words' or tokens and 5,831 individual words or types.
The size of the corpus, however, was not an issue since the materials to be
examined were obviously the ones actually in use in my school for teaching purposes
and, after all, though many writers advocate the idea that a corpus should contain
millions of words (Sinclair, 1991; Biber, Conrad & Reppen, 1998), the amount of
language required depends on the purpose of the research (Barnbrook,1996;
Coxhead, 2000) and the sub-corpus or mini-corpus approach is increasingly gaining
recognition for pedagogical purposes. (Willis, 1998; Lewis, 2000; Tribble, 2000)
The texts in the corpus differed in length. However, ‘norming’ the counts to compare
texts, did not seem necessary since the investigation was meant to get an overview
of the corpus ‘as it was’, without any sampling
The frequency list
The first step in the investigation consisted in the production of a word frequency list.
The list did not look significantly different from others (e.g. GSL, CIC, COBUILD). The
fifty most frequent types were mainly function (i.e. ‘non-lexical’ or ‘non-contentful’)
words (Schmitt and McCarthy, 1997:24). Differently from other lists, however, the
most common personal pronouns were ‘it’ and ‘she’ (a ship being a ‘she’), the most
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frequent modal verbs were ‘can’, ‘may’ and ‘shall’ (the latter being commonly used in
rules and regulations) and nine field-specific lexical items (ship, vessel, ships, deck,
cargo, water, oil, sea, rule, the first of which (ship) in the thirteenth place) clearly
identified the field-specific frame of reference.
‘Disambiguating’ the words to identify the field specific lexis
The lexical items which were not among the most frequent ‘general’ or ‘academic’
words - as listed by West (1953), Nation (2001:430-431) and Coxhead, (2000) amounted to 40.9% of all types.
At first, it seemed logical to deduce that this was the area where to look for fieldspecific lexis. The investigation carried out on these types, however, did not yield the
expected results as it led to identify less than two hundred field-specific lexical items,
an amount which looked incredibly low when compared to the entries of maritime
dictionaries and to the results provided by ESP researches (Inman, 1978, in
Hutchinsons & Waters,1987:166; Nation, 2001:12)
Most of the ‘technical terminology’, present in the reading texts, seemed to have
literary vanished from the word list. The only logical deduction was that failure to
identify the field specific lexis was due to the difficulty of ‘disambiguating’ the words in
isolation and assigning them appropriate meanings, a difficulty well underlined in the
relevant literature (Barnbrook, 1996; Bolinger, 1975; Hatch and Brown, 1995; Carrol,
1964; Schmitt & McCarthy, 1997) and yet greater than it had been foreseen.
It was clear that a different approach was required. The words closely related to the
maritime field would most probably be better identified by shifting the focus from
lemma types and word families to semantic analysis and word meaning and by
‘seeing the words in context’. Finding a suitable way to make ‘technical words’
‘visible’ required a good deal of time and thinking.
THE INVESTIGATION: RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS
Once you focus on word meaning and words in context, it becomes evident that the
maritime field-specific lexical items in the MEPC are hardly ever unique ‘per se’ as:
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they also belong to other semantic ESP fields, which is not surprising considering
that ME encompasses a variety of ESP sub-registers and frames of reference,

they mainly consist in ‘general words’ that take on different meanings and roles
though polysemy, homonymy and compounding.
Polysemes (words with more than one meaning), homonymes (variants spelled alike
but with no common meaning) and compounds seem to be the basic lexical devices
used to create ‘maritime vocabulary’ and it is the key role that they play in the corpus
that makes it so difficult to identify field-specific lexis when de-contextualised in a
word list.
Polysemy and homonymy
In the MEPC, polysemes and, to a lesser degree, homonyms are highly frequent
(about one fifth of all the types). To give a few examples, ‘bank’, also cited by Hatch
and Brown (1995:49), in ME, may refer not only to a financial institution or the bank
of a river but also to a ‘bank of fog’ or a ‘row of objects’ (e.g. a bank of oars, a bank of
tubes). A ‘floor’ is a horizontal subdivision in a building but it is vertical plate in the
ship bottom. ‘Air draught’ has nothing to do with a current of air but refers to the
maximum height of the ship parts above the water surface.
‘Shifts’ do not only concern the meanings but also the grammatical functions of
words: from adverbs or prepositions to adjectives, from verbs to nouns. In general
English ‘bow’ can be either a noun (a knot with two loops, a device for playing a
musical instrument or a weapon) or a verb (indicating a body motion) but in the
maritime field ‘bow’/‘bows’ is mainly used as a noun to indicate the fore end of a ship
and only pronunciation and/or context can help decide the true meaning of the word
and its grammatical function. ‘After’, a time relater (preposition/adverb) in general
English, is mainly used as an adjective in ME to define the rear of the ship (i.e. the
stern or the after end of the ship).
Differently from what usually happens in semantic field analysis according to Hatch
and Brown (1995:33), polysemy is an issue even within the same semantic field.
‘Port’, for example, beside referring to an artificial harbour, can be used to indicate an
‘opening’ or the ‘left’ side of the ship.
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Discriminating between polysemy and homonymy by working out the ‘core’ meaning
and how ‘core-like’ the meanings are, as Hatch and Brown (1995:50) suggest, is not
easy. Polysemes, however, seem to be more common than homonyms. For instance,
‘bow’, ‘bank’, ‘frame’ and ‘after’ might be defined as cases of polysemy based on
shape or position, while ‘floor’ might be a case of homonymy.
Compounding
In compounds, we find ‘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) and common
semantic relationships (Blakey, 1987:146):
B of A
e.g. cylinder cover, hatchway
B with/has A
e.g. salt water, ship owner
B contains A
e.g. wheelhouse , storeroom
B is made of/from A
e.g. copper wire, air-cushion
B in/on/at A
e.g. port operations, after peak tank
B operated by A
e.g. hand pump, steam engine
B uses A
e.g. water plant
B shaped like A
e.g. needle valve, I-beam
B invented by A
e.g. Diesel engine, Beaufort wind scale
In the MEPC, however, compounding also involves the use of adjectives (deep tank,
double bottom, forecastle, parallel middle body, strong beam, upper deck),
nominalised adjectives (deck longitudinals), ordinal numbers (first mate, third
engineer), prepositions (‘tween deck, upkeep, overhaul), 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), the names of seasons (summer load
line) and metaphors (cat’s walk, dog watch, crow’s nest, donkeyman).
Reverse combinations (depth moulded, length overall), adjectival compounds
(watertight, oil tight), poly-words created by connecting words with prepositions
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(round of deck, turn of the bilge, men-of-war, length between perpendiculars) or by
using the possessive case (Ship’s Cook, a specific rank or qualification) can also be
detected.
All these multi-word
items do
not
only condense
information
(Hatch
&
Brown,1995:191) and create new meanings different from the one of each of the
parts making up a combination (Barlow,1996:12): they are a way of creating ‘unique’
meanings. In fact, in most cases, they are the only acceptable referential forms
available to point to areas of experience shared by the target maritime community.
They do not serve other frames of reference and there exist no other words to point
to the concepts they represent. These ‘multi-word sense-segments’ have stable
relationships having frozen into fixed forms and are to be considered as single words
though written with hyphens or with spaces in between. They can be seen as
extreme forms of fixed collocation (Becker, 1975:8; Schmitt and McCarthy, 1997:43).
Other lexical aspects
Information, so frequently condensed by using compounds, is also made shorter and
quicker by means of clippings (bosun for boatswain, f’c’sl for forecastle), initialization
(A.B.S.) and acronyms (SOLAS: Safety Of Life At Sea, MARPOL: MARine POLlution)
As ME is not used for aesthetic purposes in the professional field, adjectives are
concrete and denotative, mostly referring to physical aspects such as dimensions,
position, speed, stability and strength. It is, however, possible to detect instances of
metaphorical use of the language in connection with the word ‘ship’ and with animal
names . The ship is a ‘she’, even when she is given a masculine name, and so,
transferring meaning from one domain to another, she has a ‘backbone’ (the keel)
and ‘ribs’ (the side vertical frames). Animal names are used metaphorically in
compounds or fixed collocations (cat’s walk, dog watch, crow’s nest, donkeyman)
having ‘specialized unitary meaning’ (Schmitt and McCarthy, 1997:45).
Field-specific borrowings are numerous due to the easiness of contacts between
maritime communities, but they are often difficult to spot because many items were
absorbed so early into the language to become fully anglicized. To mention just a
few: captain, navy, officer (French), cargo, canoe, niña (Spanish), anchor (Greek),
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admiral (Arabic), yacht, buoy, hull, dock, cruise (Dutch), tornado, hurricane
(Caribbean), tsunami (Japanese) (Eckersley, & Eckersley, 1960: 417-432).
Conclusions
On the basis of this study, we could say that, in the MEPC, ‘common words’ take on
meanings and roles different from the ones they have in ‘General English’. The most
common ‘word forms’ are present but the most ‘common meanings’ are not equally
present. Sorting out lexical items just according to their ‘shapes’ and forms does not
lead to satisfactory results. It is only by focusing on word meaning and words in
context that it is possible to realize that, setting aside the lexical items that occur
across various disciplines, the maritime field-specific lexis consists of few really
‘unique’ words and of a large number of items, not ‘unique’ in and of themselves,
which become ‘technical’ and ‘field specific’ through the role played by polysemy,
homonymy and compounding. Such items are ‘field specific’ and even ‘unique’ since
they are used with these specific meanings only inside the ME frame of reference.
On the basis of this investigation, ME lexis could, therefore, be classified into:

‘unique’ field specific lexical items (a very limited number)

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
This classifications does not, however, correspond entirely to the findings of
researchers like Bell, (2004), Dudley-Evans & John (1998), Hutchinson and Waters
(1987), Nation (2001) Nation and Kyongho (1995) Trimble (1995) and a wider and
deeper analysis of the ME lexical system should be carried out before assuming that
the features observed in the MEPC may apply to ME in general, though this may be
considered as a likely possibility.
THE PEDAGOGIC WASH-BACK
The insight gained through this investigation was particularly useful for pedagogical
purposes. It made me aware of some of the main features of the language I was
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exposing my students to, at least as concerns lexis, e.g. how large the number of
homonyms, homophones and compounds was in the teaching materials used. I also
realized how difficult, even in context, it is to ‘see’ all the meanings the same lexical
item may have and how huge the contrast between ‘impression’ of language detail
and evidence compiled objectively (Sinclair, 1991:4) may be.
On the basis of the insight gained, I came to the conclusion that the difficulties that
my learners encountered in building up a satisfactory ME mental lexicon were
probably due to the specific characteristics of the language - which had not been
adequately understood and focalized on - and that a different approach in designing
learning tasks had to be adopted, shifting the focus from synonyms and antonyms to
homonyms, homophones and compounds.
Homonyms may seem obvious and compounds transparent to native speakers but
they are not necessarily so to L2 learners. So the new tasks devised consisted in
‘sense-segment-based lexical activities’ aiming at helping the learners create new
rules of usage by matching ‘old words’ to ‘new meanings’, exploring the ‘multiple
meanings’ that a word may have in different contexts, analysing and manipulating the
different relationships and combinations and recognizing the L2 ‘sense-segments’ for
which Italian has only one highly ‘technical’ word (Laufer and Shmueli, 1997).
The word lists and the tables produced while investigating the corpus proved useful
to refer to in devising the new learning tasks as they made focusing on the most
frequent and on the least frequent words easier.
On the whole, the learners’ feed-back on the new activities was quite positive and a
satisfactory improvement in vocabulary acquisition could be noted.
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