DISCOURSE OF VHF COMMUNICATION AT SEA AND THE INTERCULTURAL ASPECT

Abstract

Discourse analysis of real examples of internal and external communication at sea represents a real challenge for linguists. Research in this field is at its very beginning and was partially presented in the final report of the MARCOM project (1999). The main reason for this is the scarcity of the available VHF material and on-board verbal recordings. This paper explored to what extent the rules for radio conversation are applied in the segments of real verbal communication between ships at sea, especially with regard to application of the Standard Marine Communication Phrases (SMCP), set by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in 2001. Using knowledge of conversation analysis as a peculiar branch of discourse analysis and intercultural communication theories dealing with multi-cultural crewing issues, the special emphasis was given to the formal/informal, official/unofficial and standardized/non-standardized discourse dichotomies.