Other-initiated repair as an indicator of critical communication in ship-to-ship interaction

Abstract

Communication is an essential part of most joint activities, and effective means to identify and rectify misunderstandings are necessary to reach mutual understandings. In the maritime domain, faulty communication is often a contributing cause to ship accidents, potentially putting human lives, vessels, and the environment at risk. This study explores the use of other-initiated repair in maritime ship-to-ship communication. The purpose is to classify and analyse other-initiated repair and describe the specific practices used to initiate repair and rectify mistakes. Based on an analysis of authentic communication between vessels involved in icebreaker operations, findings indicate that other-initiated repair occurs less frequently in this corpus compared to other corpora of naturally occurring conversations. A possible reason is that radio communication, which is highly structured, has other means to identify communicative errors. More than half of the repair initiations use open requests to identify a trouble turn, and the most common repair solution is a full or partial repeat. Furthermore, maritime radio communication has an inherent slowness due to technical limitations that do not permit simultaneous talk. It is argued this refrains speakers from using long or complex messages, as the listener has no way to indicate trouble until next turn.