Sassen Claudia. Linguistic Dimensions of Crisis Talk: Formalising structures in a controlled language

Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2005. — x, 230 p.: ill. — (Pragmatics & Beyond, New Series, Volume 136; ISSN 0922-842X). — ISBN 90-272-5379-X; 1-58811-642-5.This book offers an HPSG-based discourse grammar for a controlled language (Air Traffic Control) that allows the identification of well-formed discourse patterns. A formalisation of discourse theoretical structures that occur especially in crisis situations that involve potential aviation disasters is introduced. Of particular importance in this context are discourse sequences that help secure uptake among the crew and between crew and tower in order to coordinate actions that might result in avoiding a potential disaster. In order to describe the relevant phenomena, an extended HPSG formalism is used. The extension concerns the capability of modelling speech acts as proposed by Searle & Vanderveken (1985). The grammar is modelled by employing XML as a denotational semantics and is applied to the corpus data. This work thus lays the foundation for the automatic recognition of discourse structures in aviation communication.Acknowledgments.
Towards an analysis of crisis talk.
Objectives and requirements.
The scenario: Air traffic control.
Overview of presentation.
Discourse-related approaches.
Speech act theory.
An illocutionary logic: Searle & Vanderveken.
An alternative: Ross’s performative analysis.
Approaches to discourse structure.
Linguistic and corpus methodology.
Formalisms, methods and linguistic theory.
Dialogues and theories: Some general considerations.
Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) for illocutionary acts.
Creating a crisis talk corpus.
Linguistic annotation: Standards and schemata.
Analysis of general dialogue properties.
Dialogue typology.
Documenting and standardising the ATC/CVR-DATA.
XML-markup of the standardised data.
Phases in aviation communication.
Discourse-control processes.
Analysis of particular dialogue properties.
Identifying regularities.
Representation of an utterance sequence as an HPSG-based sign.
Representation of an utterance-token as an HPSG-based sign.
Implementation: XML as a denotational semantics for HPSG-based signs.
Conclusion.
Appendix.
Select glossary of relevant aviation terms.
Abbreviations.
A key to the atomic representation of speech act types.
Examples: Minimal sequences and their modifications.
Two sample transcripts.
Background information to samples.
References.
Subject index.