Aviation Radiotelephony Discourse: An Issue of Safety 225from intercultural difficulties of interaction based on cultural differences
and differences in local procedures and attitudes.
The safety threats in a multicultural context ranged from linguistic,
discursive-interactional and intercultural to human (personal) and
technical factors. Studies of discursive-interactional problems have
resulted in identifying a number of factors that may affect safe
radiotelephony communication. The list reported is as follows: code
switching; readback/hearback failures; non-cooperation; conflicts and
relationship problems; lack of conversation monitoring; turn taking by a
non-ratified participant; multiple communications; repetition problem
using another language; incomplete content (information omission); lack
of coordination (combined positions/sectors, confusing hand-offs);
message sent or heard, but not understood; untimely transmissions; pilot
reluctance to declare emergency; problems with kinds of repetition;
engagement (interlocutor’s role) and ritualization; failure to clarify
instructions; excessive words (inclusion of words beyond what is
prescribed); inferences and false suppositions; filtering communications;
interruptions; lack of situational awareness; acting on message
interpretations that are not explicitly accepted as understood; and wrong
interpretation of speech acts (Moteiro 2012: 59-60).
The miscommunications based on cultural background, personal
qualities, experiences, etc. prove the dominant role of the human
participants taking part in verbal and non-verbal radiotelephony
communication discourse. However, it is hardly necessary to argue that
human language communication in professional environments requires at
least minimum analytical consideration of its mental background, which is
the cognitive approach to radiotelephony discourse.
Radiotelephony discourse: cognitive perspective
George Lakoff points out that in the language of the brain, words and
thoughts are defined relative to narrative frames and conceptual
metaphors. These frames are patterned into our nervous system as a result
of experience and tend to structure a huge amount of our thought.. Frame
structures are gradually created with a variety of components, such as
neural binding circuitry, neural signatures, and event structures. These
narrative-metaphorical structures imbedded in the nervous system serve as
reference patterns with which new experience is assessed, choices made,
values and behaviors established. In this process, there is a protagonist, the
person whose point of view is being taken, and events have valence—they
are good or bad—and they evoke appropriate emotions that fit dramatic