Register of Electronic Communication at Sea
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22364/BJELLC.05.2015.05Keywords:
electronic communication, Maritime English, specialized corpus, register analysis, situational and linguistic characteristics of emailsAbstract
Electronic communication is one of most frequent written communication means used by marine officers to exchange any information relevant to the safety of life at sea. Due to dire consequences which might be a result of miscommunication caused by a lack of proper English language use, the International Maritime Organization highlights the importance of working knowledge of written English for marine officers. Since there is limited research on the linguistic aspects of Maritime English correspondence, it is important to determine the linguistic features of this specific maritime genre. Therefore, the aim of this study was to conduct a register analysis of a specialized corpus of electronic mail, written by chief engineers. The results revealed that professional electronic communication among chief engineers exhibits the features of written and spoken register and creates a hybrid form constructing a new genre of language use. The findings of this study revealed some register features, for example, the omission of some parts of speech, abbreviations and shortened forms of specific terminology and the use of emoticons.
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