Aviation Radiotelephony Discourse: An Issue of Safety 223It was interesting to learn that the lexical analysis revealed a general
pattern of similarities between the two corpora: both are constituted of a
finite lexicon comprising less than 600 word types and being mainly
composed of nouns, then verbs and prepositions. The differences have
been observed at lexical and grammatical levels. For the purposes of
radiotelephony discourse analysis, it is useful to count different markers
introducing subjectivity in air-ground communication that can help
understand the use of a more natural language in radiotelephony (Lopez et
al. 2013).
Other research was directed toward the use of plain English in
radiotelephony communication, and stated the ratio between phraseology
and plain English lexis used in urgent and emergency situations. The study
was conducted on the basis of authentic exchanges between Ukrainian
controllers and international flight crews with both native English and
non-native English pilots. The average ratio reported was 4/1 (80
phraseological units to 20 lexical units of plain English) for a single
exchange unit (Petrashchuk and Vasiukovich 2015).
Various radiotelephony miscommunications among non-native English
radiotelephony interaction participants have been reported. Estival and
Molesworth reported linguistic factors affecting radio communication,
such as comprehension, phraseology, intonation, speech irregularities and
the use (or misuse) of pauses. The various types of miscommunication in
the noisy aviation environment are as follows: misinterpretation of verbal
messages; errors in pronunciation and phonology; syntax and lexicon
inaccuracies; prosody and intonation errors; pragmatic mistakes. The most
typical errors affecting radiotelephony communication negatively are
prosodic (‘to’ – ‘two’), semantic confusion between phraseology and
general language meaning (‘hold’ meaning ‘stop’ in phraseology and ‘go
on’ in general English) (Estival and Molesworth 2012).
The results report miscommunications at different linguistic levels, due
to error at levels of phonology and pronunciation; syntax and lexicon;
prosody and intonation; and at the level of pragmatics. Other factors
known to affect radio communication include: (a) quality of transmission;
(b) noise in the cockpit; and (c) the operational expectations of both pilots
and air traffic controllers.
The most important linguistic factor for aviation communication
identified is the choice of lexical items or phrases, the use of colloquial
meanings of terms in their language production, thus causing problems for
non-native English pilots. The results obtained show that the problems are
mostly due to lack of adherence to phraseology by air traffic controllers,
who are English native speakers in Australia. Their rapid prosody when