Linguistic Features of Marine Orders

In the world of international shipping, effective communication is an essential ingredient to safe and efficient ship operations as “careless talk costs lives”. To maintain this effectiveness, marine orders, one of the most important factors of communication at sea, must be precise, simple and unambiguous to avoid confusion and error. With an aim to investigate more about the effectiveness of these marine orders, 190 marine orders used on board and in external communications were collected and analyzed quantitatively in terms of speech acts categories, directness, type of sentence, length, and density of nautical terms. Based on the data analysis of these linguistic features, the similarities and differences between the orders used on board and in external communications are unveiled. Finally, all of these analyses and findings are summed up to make the most general and concise conclusions about the effectiveness of marine orders used in communications at sea.