Profiling maritime communication by non-native speakers: A quantitative comparison between the baseline and standard marine communication phraseology

- Linguistic profile defined for maritime bridge team communication.
- Profile allows quantitative comparisons of different speech communities and discourse situations.
- Significant linguistic differences of maritime communication are quantified.
- Standard communication behaviour modelled which can be used as a benchmark.
- Benchmark can help improve effectiveness of bridge team communication.

This paper compares ESP communication by non-native speakers of Maritime English with communication outside a nautical setting in order to profile its structural idiosyncrasy. Vocabulary growth, word frequencies, lexical and key word densities, and grammar diversity as dependent linguistic variables observed in transcribed full-mission simulation exercises are contrasted to the Brown Corpus, the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English and the Standard Marine Communication Phrases (SMCP). Using quantitative linguistics, inherent structural patterns of nautical team communication are identified and similarities and variations highlighted. Significant differences found in all linguistic features are gauged by means of the Probability of Superiority (PS) effect size. A linguistic profile is created which quantifies the observed language patterns and provides a quantitative model for the linguistic genre of this particular discourse community. The model fills the gap of quantitative research on empirical bridge team communication samples and delivers a valid tool for estimating the magnitude of observed linguistic effects.