Authentic routine ship-shore communication in the Northern Adriatic Sea area – A corpus analysis of discourse features

Abstract

In the global maritime industry, ineffective and ambiguous communication often is a main or contributing cause of shipping accidents. Nevertheless, because of the limited availability of authentic data, quantitative studies in maritime communication are rare. In addition, previous studies seem to have used the Standard Marine Communication Phrases as the prescriptive maritime communication standard, thus overlooking the superordinate role of the Manual for Use by the Maritime Mobile and Maritime Mobile-Satellite Services published by the International Telecommunication Union. Therefore, this paper uses a specialised spoken corpus of authentic routine ship-shore communication to quantify the rate of compliance of authentic routine ship-shore communication with the standard protocol of communication for ships and shore services as the key communication agents in the provision of navigational safety and efficiency. The findings show that authentic routine ship-shore communication still significantly deviates from the standard protocol of communication. In addition, the rate of compliance varies across the analysed elements and between the two communication agents examined in this study. Finally, the results indicate the need for harmonisation between the documents that define the standard protocol of communication.