Revisiting the Linguistic Theories

Abstract

The current study aims at shedding light on the new inevitable direction adopted by linguistic theoreticians to analyze the specialized discourse. The linguistic theories have always supported and accompanied the linguistic analyses of multiple types of discourse. However the breach of regularities existing in the jargon resulting from the specialized discourse of certain domains has reshaped the relationship between the linguistic theories and text analysis from a relationship of compatibility to a relation of controversy that requires a novel revolutionary method to analyze the language for pedagogical aims. A corpus analysis of 20 dialogues from the routine conversation between Pilots and Airline-Traffic Controllers was compiled to detect what linguistic levels’ analyses represent a novel method of looking at the special language from a new perspective and how linguistic theories can be able to reconsider the oddities and the unusual language forms as regularities and standardized language. The results of the study reveal that the linguistic analysis of the pilots-to-airline traffic controllers’ conversation – called also radiotelephony conversation – shows that this variety constitutes a formulaic language which is highly structured and impossible to be penetrated by outsiders. This specialized discourse comprises mainly sentences with unusual word order, complex compound nouns that form a special phraseology, acronyms as well as the subject-specific nomenclature that condense whole messages. The linguistic analysis suggests that this variety with a special use of the language has to be recognized by linguists. The acceptability and recognition of unusual language is in itself an intention to build new linguistic theories that can enlarge the scope of institutionalization of new varieties. Recommendations were formulated to linguistically govern the highly specialized discourse by specific flexible theories.