A Corpus-based Study on the Lexical Features of Annual Reports of Shipping Companies: A Case Study of COSCO Shipping and Maersk

As a special type of business text, the annual report has an important function of presenting the development of the company and is an important basis for planning the company’s development in the coming year. In this paper, COSCO Shipping and Maersk’s annual reports were selected as research objects, and a self-constructed corpus was built to compare and analyse their high-frequency words, lexical density and lexical sophistication. The results found that: (1) The high-frequency words used in the annual reports of COSCO Shipping and Maersk are generally similar, with differences in word frequency and individual words. (2) The lexical density of COSCO Shipping’s annual report is lower than that of Maersk’s annual report, which discloses a greater amount of information. (3) Maersk’s annual report has a higher level of lexical sophistication and is more difficult to read. Based on this, the author also discusses the factors behind the differences, aiming to help English learners and shipping practitioners to better read and understand the annual reports of shipping companies.