It must always be borne in mind that the SMCP will be aimed at
assisting primarily those ships' officers and other maritime personnel who are non-native
English speakers handling maritime English as a device for communication and, being
technicians, are not supposed to have a far- reaching insight into applied linguistics.
That's why the SMCP endeavour to be clear and brief in their wording, unambiguous in their
proposition, consistent in vocabulary and structure, and they use a terminology adequate
to maritime subjects. In order to facilitate the formation of dialogues, the principle of
prompt/question and response/answer has been adhered to wherever practicable and deemed
useful.
Furthermore, certain so-called non-verbal conditions have been taken
into consideration, such as communicative relevance and situational context, i.e. local,
personal, technological and socio- cultural circumstances.
And, the eight Message Markers as introduced by Seaspeak (4) were felt
to be valuable especially in VTS and voice communications on radio in general. So they
have been also allowed for and commented on in the SMCP in order to a priori minimize
misinterpretation of messages. However, it will be left at the discretion of the users
whether and when to apply them (see Annex 1, Part I - General, 3).
Detailed examples demonstrating the realization of the strategies
described above will be given in Annexes 2 and 3 of this paper. Finally, in the
introducing general sections of the SMCP the prospective users will also find quite a
number of hints suited or even necessary to make verbal communication at sea run smoothly
and efficiently.
2.3 Arrangement and coverage of the SMCP
Except for the general sections the basic items of the SMCP are covered
by two main parts which are External Communication Phrases and On-board Communication
Phrases. This distinction was considered necessary though the contents of communications
overlap in some instances. There are, anyhow, sometimes essential differences between
voice communication on radio on the one hand and the more freely organizing face-to-face
communication on the other
