Visualization of Collocational Networks: Maritime English Keywords

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore and then visualize collocational networks of the most frequent maritime English synonyms through network analysis. To achieve this goal, we used WordSmith Tools to extract keywords from the Maritime English Corpus (MECO) Ⅱ and then we compared them with a general English corpus, the British National Corpus Baby. We discuss two pairs of near-synonyms: maritime-marine and ship-vessel from among very highly frequent keywords in the MECO Ⅱ. We used Mutual Information 3 to discover significant collocations in order to find collocational patterns. The meanings of collocates of near-synonyms were grouped in several semantic fields. In order to explore language networks of maritime vocabularies, we used the social network analysis tools, NetMiner and UCINET. We found that collocates of near-synonyms were quite different. After we extended our work to all collocations, we found that the entire network of all collocations also shows distributions and characteristics similar to those of our target networks.