Illocutionary force indicating devices in spoken maritime communications

The paper provides a corpus-driven analysis of different illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs) in a spoken corpus of maritime VHF communications. The study relies on the speech act theory (Austin, 1962) and the notion of IFIDs (Searle, 1969). IFIDs refer to various linguistic and non-linguistic devices that indicate the illocutionary force of an utterance, which might include lexical means (verbs, adverbs, etc.), word order, intonation and other means. The study is conducted on a spoken corpus which consists of about ten hours of communication between the ship and the shore. The analysis is performed by employing a combination of quantitative and qualitative approach. First, fifty exchanges are analyzed to identify possible IFIDs. This is followed by corpus analysis of the IFIDs identified in the previous stage. The aim is to shed light on the pragmatic aspect of maritime communications which are otherwise highly structured and institutionalized.