Discourse exponents of standing orders on board ship

Abstract

Deck officers must be very familiar with the content of the Standing Orders. This peculiar genre, which is usually written on one page of text and with a distinguishable graphical layout, combines administrative and legal discourse. The subtle interrelation between linguistic features on different levels of the analysis implies the ship’s hierarchy and organization which is a precondition for the safety of the ship. Analysis in this paper relies on discourse and genre knowledge and represents a continuation of the author’s research on maritime written genres in terms of both their structure an interpretation of language facts. Structure analysis in the paper is based on Bhatia’s (1993) model. After the moves of Standing Orders were established, the analysis focused on discursive characteristics of each move. As Standing Orders as genre for the most part belong to legal discourse (apart from commercial and merchant discourse), the analysis tends to show correlation between discourse exponents of this legal genre and crew members’ position and duties on board ship. Findings of this paper can be pedagogically useful in terms of providing a teaching model that will aid Maritime English teachers to convey knowledge of this genre to students, especially future deck officers and ship masters.