earticle

영어

The International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), as the most important international maritime treaty regulating ship safety, establishes minimum safety levels for construction, equipment and operation. Due to the development of technology over time, safety understanding and management, all three safety standards have been undergoing revision. This paper aims to explore and explain the trends of these changing standards by employing keyword analysis of the SOLAS Convention based on the idea that keywords are indicative of changes in writing style, which can ultimately be linked back to social change. To achieve this objective, five consolidated versions of the SOLAS Convention, covering the period from 1974 to 2015, were targeted for data collection. Keywords for three safety standards in each version were extracted respectively using WordSmith Tools 6.0. Statistical measures, including frequency count and type-token ratio, were adopted to analyze the degree of diachronic changes in each safety standard, comparing the lexical distribution and density of each keyword list. The findings suggest that all three safety standards have been revised over time, and the changes vary in terms of degree and content. This study is believed to be useful in understanding the safety concerns in the maritime industry and to contribute to the literature in diachronic research conducted by a keyword-based approach.