ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to examine the extent to which the omission of linguistic elements from instructions issued by air traffic controllers affects pilot's comprehension as evidenced by the accuracy of their readbacks. Each academic discipline has its language, its terminology, and its style of argumentation. What's more, what counts as "evidence" can be very different in different disciplines. Philps has offered a linguistic analysis of the syntactic structure of Aviation English. ATC messages can also be described as "telegraphic speech" in that they contain few function words, in particular, prepositions. Intonation units have been linked to the cognitive notion of focal attention. McCandless study of the Salt Lake City terminal area communications showed that "there was a significant increase in controller speech rate and number of speech acts contained in a transmission during periods of heavy traffic", and that "more requests for repeated messages and corrections of incomplete readbacks were observed during moderate to heavy workloads".
