The dynamics of pragmatics and lexico-grammatical productivity in the Standard Marine Communication Phrases: A corpus-based exploratory study

This article proposes additional SMCP-compatible phrases for harbour towage communication and demonstrates the productive potential of the IMO’s Standard Marine Communication Phrases (IMO, 2002) as a specialised controlled language through corpus-informed pragmatic analysis. A corpus-based comparison between the existing SMCP phrase inventory and a specialised corpus of harbour towage guidance docuements reveals a number of communicative gaps in exchanges involving the Tug Master and the Pilot or, depending on the operational context, the Master. Rather than departing from the principles on which the SMCP were conceived, the study formulates additional phrases that remain consistent with their grammatical, lexical, semantic, and functional constraints. To this end, the analysis combines two specialised English corpora: an SMCP corpus containing the existing towage- and pilotage-related phrases, and a purpose-built corpus of harbour towage guidelines used to identify communicative situations not currently covered. These data are examined through pragmatic annotation and lexico-grammatical pattern extraction in order to map communicative functions onto recurrent SMCP phrase structures and use them as templates for phrase generation. The results show that the proposed procedure makes it possible to formulate new phrases in a controlled and linguistically consistent way, thereby broadening SMCP coverage in the harbour towage domain, confirming the productive capacity of this specialised controlled language, and supporting further phrase development in other underrepresented areas of maritime communication.