Speech acts in professional maritime discourse: A pragmatic risk analysis of bridge team communication directives and commissives in full-mission simulation

The paper studies verbal maritime communication by categorising spontaneous professional discourse observed in co-operative full-mission simulation exercises into the illocutionary points of commissives and directives according to Searle's original classification. The research adopts a Corpus Pragmatics approach by combining vertical Corpus Linguistics methods with horizontal Pragmatics analyses. Between-group analyses of speech acts by native and non-native speakers of English are carried out and possible risks of miscommunication classified and compared. On the basis of the circular Osgood-Schramm communication model the sender-receiver interaction is investigated for either speaker group. Findings include both quantitative and qualitative between-group differences in locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts. These differences are evaluated as causal factors in effective communicative acts and as contributory factors for miscommunication in the maritime domain. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.