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Lexico-syntactic features of ab initio pilots' and controllers' aeronautical English: A corpus linguistic investigation of aviation communication in the Philippine airspace

Paper · 2024 · Ramsey Ferrer and Shirley Dita

Summary

Aviation English in the Philippines has barely been studied, and real pilot–controller radio exchanges there had never been described linguistically. The authors examine the vocabulary and sentence patterns of aeronautical English produced by ab initio (trainee) pilots on solo flights and the controllers who handle them. Their data is a sub-corpus of the Aviation Corpus of English-Philippines (ACE-PHI), which is still under construction, and it covers routine situations only. They count lexical categories and analyse sentence-level patterns using Philps' (1991) transformational-generative framework, in which radiotelephony utterances are treated as transformed versions of full natural-English sentences. Nouns dominate the vocabulary, and aircraft callsigns are the most frequent single type. Active and imperative constructions are the most common sentence patterns. Overall the register is elliptical, built from rule-governed deletions that leave the listener to restore the missing pieces. The speakers also add greetings and politeness markers that the manuals do not prescribe. The study is a first baseline for Philippine aviation English, a field where misunderstandings on the radio have contributed to fatal accidents.

Key points

  • Data: ACE-PHI sub-corpus of pilot–controller communication, limited to ab initio solo flights in routine conditions.
  • Lexical frequency: nouns are the densest category, with aircraft callsigns on top. Below nouns, cardinals rank second and verbs third; prepositions come next, then adjectives, with conjunctions after them, adverbs following, and pronouns in last place.
  • Syntax: imperative and active transformations are the most frequent patterns, and passives also occur. The register is marked by systematic deletion relative to natural English, as in Philps' (1991) ICAO-based analysis.
  • Non-standard usage:
    • Some utterances deviate from prescribed phraseology, for example "clear the runway" where the standard term is "vacate".
    • Earlier Filipino studies found that "go ahead" and "hold short" are sometimes understood with the wrong meaning.
  • Politeness markers: the corpus contains exclamatory or politeness markers outside the manuals, such as thank you, good day, congratulations, sir and ma'am.
  • Limitations: routine situations only, sentence-level analysis only, and no commercial-flight data yet.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Telegraphic speech is modelled as full sentences that have undergone regular deletions (determiners, linking verbs, noun phrases), with the hearer expected to rebuild them; this makes clipped text tractable rather than "ungrammatical."
  • I2. Domain-specific token types such as callsigns, numeric values and alphanumeric codes form the bulk of a restricted register, so they deserve their own categories instead of being folded into generic nouns and numbers.
  • I3. Greetings, thanks and honorifics are treated as interpersonal add-ons that sit outside the prescribed content structure of the message.
  • I4. Actual usage is checked against a prescribed standard to locate phrases whose conventional domain meaning differs from their literal reading ("hold short" means do not cross).

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tree): a pre-parse step could restore elided copulas, determiners and subjects in headline- or instruction-style input, marking them as inserted, so the UD parser sees near-standard sentences.
  • I2 (tokens): the tokenizer and tagger could recognise identifier-like and code-like tokens (callsigns, flight levels, runway numbers) as distinct classes, which would cut tagging errors in technical text.
  • I3 (frames): the speech-act layer could tag such markers as social acts and keep them out of the who-did-what frames, so politeness does not pollute propositional content.
  • I4 (world): compiled knowledge could store domain-specific meanings of fixed phrases, so the world model records the intended state (aircraft stays before the runway) rather than a literal misreading.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 18,614 worksArtificial Intelligence · 17,965 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,379 works

Cite

Cite as Ramsey Ferrer and Shirley Dita. 2024. Lexico-syntactic features of ab initio pilots' and controllers' aeronautical English: A corpus linguistic investigation of aviation communication in the Philippine airspace. Proceedings of the 38th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{ferrer2024lexico,
  title = {{Lexico-syntactic features of ab initio pilots' and controllers' aeronautical English: A corpus linguistic investigation of aviation communication in the Philippine airspace}},
  author = {Ramsey Ferrer and Shirley Dita},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 38th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation},
  year = {2024},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2024.paclic-1.101/}
}

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