Abstract
Students of Maritime English (ME) encounter some of the principal maritime conventions and codes such as SOLAS, MARPOL, STCW, ISPS code, etc., at one point or another in the course of their studies. Since conventions are primary legal matter, studying the language of conventions can mainly be understanding specific terminologies and some of the peculiar styles of legal documents. The purpose of this study is to investigate linguistic features of two central conventions, namely International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) and International Convention for the Prevention of Marine Pollution from Ships (MARPOL). The ultimate goal of the study is to help the students of ME study the linguistic aspects of conventions easily and thus have a better understanding of them. To this end, the study analyzed the texts of SOLAS and MARPOL from the perspective of genre analysis. It was found that they shared some linguistic features such as the high frequency of obligatory modal, shall, and relative pronoun, which, the passive voice, and compound-complex sentences, all of which are known to be the characteristics of legal documents. They revealed some differences as well. Besides the difference in major registers, “shall + be + past participle + preposition,” “the Noun of (the/this) Noun,” idiomatic words, and multiple-word nouns appeared to be common structures in SOLAS, but occurred much less in MARPOL. Some pedagogical implications are suggested.
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