Aviation Radiotelephony Discourse: An Issue of Safety 227On the other hand, in the case of an emergency the routine actions and
utterances are in situational dissonance leading possibly to cognitive
dissonance. It might lead to a personal subconscious incorrect
interpretation or/and choice of lexis or other language means which, in its
turn, cause misunderstanding and undermine flight safety.
As mentioned before, the radiotelephony exchange follows the pilot’s
as well as the air traffic controller’s actions aimed at safe flight
operation/air traffic control. Therefore, the communication will be affected
by many factors occurring during operation of the flight and will reflect
the consequences of the preceding actions (non-verbal). It has been
reported that there are many other, non-verbal, human factors contributing
in radiotelephony miscommunications, namely memory limits, actions and
reactions due to emergency situations, fatigue, failure to maintain
vigilance, expectation and fixation, high workload, distraction, low level
of professional experience, giving/receiving training, gender (male/female)
and physiology, age, boredom, personal problems (Moteiro 2012).
The dominant human nature of radiotelephony discourse points to the
usefulness and appropriateness of a co-operative strategy of interaction,
which is a principle of communication reciprocity. A tendency of human
social communication within radiotelephony to be cooperative and
reciprocal has been reported (Kukovec 2008). The linguistic normalisation
typical for phraseology enables the various interlocutors to minimise their
linguistic and cognitive efforts in carrying out the task in hand thanks to
their shared knowledge. This normalized standard English prescribed for
use in radiotelephony is often supplemented by language cliché used in
general spoken communication, and, therefore, easily shared by interactants.
The ‘humanization’ of radiotelephony discourse proves the cognitive
nature of air-to-ground interaction due to cognitive frames signaling this
particular way of communication. Research on radiotelephony in a real use
language corpus reported up to 29 out of the 52 nouns considered as not
exclusively belonging to the air traffic domain. The word forms “sir”,
“problem”, “madam”, “moment”, “afternoon”, “mountain(s)”, “question”,
“best”, “help”, etc. indeed belong to a more general area (Lopez et al.
2013).
This vocabulary reflects a part of the lexicon needed by pilots and
controllers to answer their communication needs that are not fulfilled by
phraseology: they are everyday words used within radiotelephony
communications. “The main syntactic characteristics of phraseology (the
deletion of subject pronouns, determiners and modals, for instance)
illustrate the objectivity of this type of discourse. Therefore, air-ground
communications containing subject pronouns, but also determiners,