From the inception of IMO in 1973, accidents that had significant consequences triggered a certain initiative among the people concerning maritime safety, to amend and improve the international regulations on safety at sea. According to Rosso (2000), "Scandinavian Star" accident in 1990 can arguably be considered as the projection of the SMCP. It was known that one of the major causes that contributed to the 159 casualties of the fire aboard the ship was the poor communication between the crew and the passengers. Due to the crew’s inadequate knowledge of the English language that has been the common language in the international maritime community, the passengers were not able to escape as quickly and safely as possible.

Led by Peter Trenkner, the SMCP project aimed to serve as a true “survival kit” in the Maritime English communication. The major efforts were devoted to making the phrases as simple as possible and complying with the guidelines in Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers (or STCW) - 95. Introducing the SMCP, the IMO resolutions A.857 (20) and A.918 (22) clearly recommend that “use of the IMO SMCP should be made as often as possible in preference to other wording of similar meaning; as a minimum requirement, users should adhere as closely as possible to them in relevant situations” (p. 127).

SMCP consists of two parts corresponding to the external and on-board communication requirements for not only mariners, but also pilots and port staff. One of the important contributions offered by the phrases is the chapter dedicated to VTS communications which was not included in the previous Standard Marine Navigational Vocabulary (SMNV). The wide-spread implantation and continuous growth of VTS all over the world demanded this type of communicational phrases.

One of the main goals for compiling the SMCP is “to standardize* the language used in communication for navigation at sea, in port approaches, waterways and harbours, and on board vessels with multilingual crews” (IMO SMCP: 1). For this reason, the SMCP intentionally offers a simplified version of Maritime English using standardized structures. In other words, it does not cover a vast range of language knowledge including vocabulary, grammar, discourse structures, etc., which are required for a good communicator. Based on the IMO SMCP and the previous studies on the phrases (Franceschi, 2014; Mitkova, Genova, & Halid, 2009), some linguistic features of SMCP can be summarized: 1) A block language is applied, which often omits the function words such as the, a/an, and is/are, as done in seafaring practice; 2) Synonyms are avoided giving preference to one member of the synonymous word group; 3) Contracted forms are avoided; 4) Fully worded answers to yes/no questions are provided; 5) One phrase for one event is provided; 6) The corresponding phrases are structured according to the principle; 7) Politeness formulas in the imperative are generally avoided; 8) Latin-based words are preferred to Anglo-Saxon origin ones; 9) The past tense and the present perfect tense are rarely used; 10) With the use of formal, Latin-based words and phrases, the tone of the phrases are rather authoritative.

Utilizing the phrases as often as possible should be expected in the working field on board vessels as well as between ships and ship to shore, especially among the practitioners whose first languages are not English. VTS operators are no exception. According to the VTS Operator Model Course V-103/1 approved by IMO, the award of a VTS Operator Certificate and endorsement to act as a VTS Operator should be achieved by successfully undertaking a series of modules, among which language module ranks top. Furthermore, with English as the working language in the worldwide maritime area, IMO recommends that SMCP should be used as often as possible. Hence, it is natural to expect that the VTS communication textbooks should be congruent with the SMCP in wording, structure, and principles.

Despite the efforts of IMO’s affiliated organizations and professionals to promote the use of SMCP at sea, the question, “Is SMCP used at sea?” was often asked (Alter, 2007). Based on the perspective that the SMCP must play a critical role in maritime communication where intelligibility is prioritized, this study scrutinizes the phrases in VTS textbooks used for VTS operators in China and Korea in comparison with the SMCP, particularly focusing on lexico-grammatical patterns of some key words. Thus, we will review the notion of lexico-grammar in the below.

The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (2011) defines lexico-grammar as “a level of linguistic structure where lexis, or vocabulary, and grammar, or syntax, combine into one” (p. 3367). According to this definition, lexico-grammar involves three elements: lexis, grammar, and the relationship between the two. Although in Linguistics, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Corpus Linguistics in particular, researchers and scholars have manifested more or less different perceptions of and approaches to lexico-grammar, they have a general consensus on the idea that lexis and grammar are interrelated, an idea that was triggered by Firth’s (1968) statement, “[w]ords must not be treated as if they had isolate meaning and occurred and could be used in free distribution” (p. 18). Due to this nature of lexis and grammar, lexico-grammar approach to discourse has gained real popularity over the last few decades.

The tradition of lexico-grammar approach to texts or discourse in linguistics derived from Holliday’s SFL and more recently from Corpus Linguistics. In SFL, the term lexico-grammar is used to emphasize the interdependence of and continuity between lexis (vocabulary) and grammar (syntax). This notion is well presented in Figure 1 below in which Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) demonstrate the relationship between lexis and grammar as continuum with lexis on one end and grammar on the other:

In Gledhill’s (2011) terms, lexis and grammar are not different in nature, but rather form a unified stratum in the language: lexis is “a structured system of signs which serves to organize the vocabulary of a language,” and grammar is “a structured system of choices which serves to organize sequences of signs into texts” (p. 59).

The view of lexico-grammar as continuity between lexis and grammar has played a crucial role in Corpus Linguistics, as analyses of corpus data center around lexis, grammar, and the relationship between the two. In Corpus Linguistics, the notion of lexico-grammar is characterized in many different terms such as collocation, colligation, lexical bundle, multiword units, prefabricated units, prefabs, and phraseology. Many studies in Corpus Linguistics have devoted to eliciting lexico-grammatical patterns in texts and discourse although each study shows its own focus of concerns regarding the relationship between lexis and grammar and lexico-grammatical patterns (Bible, Conrad, & Reppen, 2006; Nesselhauf, 2005; Sinclair, 2004, and to name a few). They believe that “there are systematic association patterns between grammatical features and classes of words” (Bible, et al., 2006: 58).

Corpus-based linguistic research has attracted ESL/EFL teachers and students alike with its ability to handle a greater amount of texts at once and to provide “a much more solid foundation for descriptions of language use” (Biber, 2001: 101). Concordance lines of a word (namely node) from a corpus, which is one of the key products in the course of any corpus study, for example, provide lexico-grammatical profiles of the word (O’Keeffe et al., 2007: 14). These concordance lines help language learners understand lexico-grammatical patterns associated with individual words in natural contexts.

Gledhill (2011) lists some specific properties of lexico-grammatical (LG) patterns (p.6):

Bearing this in mind, the study investigates lexico -grammatical patterns in the SMCP and textbooks used for VTS operators in China and Korea.

The data for this study were retrieved from a Chinese VTS textbook (hereafter C-VTS), a Korean VTS textbook (hereafter K-VTS), and the IMO SMCP. The C-VTS textbook，VTS Standard Phrases, was issued by Maritime Safety Administration of the People’s Republic of China in 2005. The K-VTS textbook, titled General Maritime Communication English was issued by National Federation of Fisheries Cooperatives in Korea in 2012. Both textbooks were adopted for training VTS personnel to meet the qualifications in communicating with mariners in China and Korea.

C-VTS covered 7 parts, including “General Communication”, “Information Broadcast”, “Distress Communications”, “Navigational Assistance Service”, and so on. English phrases were paralleled with Chinese translations that have been cleared off in the C-VTS corpus. The final C-VTS corpus was composed of 14,004 running words.

K-VTS consisted of 3 chapters (General Maritime Communication English, Information Exchange in Context, and Maritime Accidents in Context) and Appendix. For each phrase, Korean expressions appeared first, then English translations followed. Only English translations were collected for the study. The total number of running words was 5,742.

In order to compare the C-VTS and the K-VTS with the SMCP, we compiled them into separate data files. Unlike the K-VTS, which is composed of intact sentences including proper names (e.g. Jeju, Suhyup-ho, Wando) and specific information (e.g. 20 degrees, 3 miles), the C-VTS and the SMCP present merely sentence patterns, leaving out a space in which specific information such as vessel names and positions, time, etc. should be filled in the context where conversation occurs. The space is indicated by dots (…) and tildes (~). In order to be able to compare lexico-grammatical patterns across C-VTS, K-VTS and SMCP data, those dots and tildes in the C-VTS and the SMCP were replaced. For the dots, we substituted certain capital letters (i.e., N for numbers, T for times, L for locations, and W for others). Tildes were replaced with standard phrases given right before a tilde. Below is an example of this kind of replacement:

SMCP covers external communication in part A and on-board communication in part B. All the languages VTS personnel require are incorporated in part A, including the on-board communication between pilots and seafarers. Thus, we embraced the whole part A of SMCP as reference for the C-VTS and the K-VTS. As a result, the total running words of the SMCP data for this study were 14,178.

In analyzing the data, both quantitative and qualitative approaches were adopted. One of the commercially available concordance tools, WordSmith 5 (Scott, 2009) was used for obtaining wordlists, finding keywords, and searching concordance lines. We first compared top 30 words in the wordlists from the SMCP and the C-VTS and the K-VTS. Several linguistically salient words were elicited from the lists and then implemented a concordance search on each word. This search would produce concordance lines of the words. All concordances for each word were printed out and stored. Once concordance lines were obtained, we analyzed association patterns of the word, investigating words to its right and left in the context, and also grammatical structures. Since we were fully aware of methodological issues that have been frequently discussed in the literature (one of the issues pertains to automatic analyses (using by tagging systems) of potentially ambiguous phrases or structures in natural language use), we also manually analyzed concordances one by one, by paying a closer attention to every single occurrence of the words in context.