Susana Murcia-Bielsa

Instructional Texts inEnglish and Spanish:a Contrastive Study

Thesis submitted towards the degree of

Ph.D.

Departamento de Filologas ExtranjerasFacultad de Filosofa y Letras

Universidad de Crdoba (Spain)

1999

Supervisors: Dr. Judy Delin

Dr. Antonio Len Sendra

1. Abstract

This thesis presents a comparative corpus-based study of English and Spanishinstructional texts for household appliances, in order to provide a general characterisation of

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instructional texts in these two languages and to show the factors underlying the choice ofparticular syntactic expressions within this text type.

The study is carried out at two levels of analysis: the macro-textual and the micro-textual.The macro-textual analysis examines (i) the situational context of instructional texts and (ii)how instructional texts are characteristically organised to convey the information necessary forthe correct use of the device. The micro-textual analysis is concerned with the function thatthe micro-element (e.g., single directives) serves in the macro-text and how this affects itsrealisation in syntactic form.

The major focus is on the micro-textual level. This micro-textual analysis is based on thefact that the actions being instructed have a hierarchical structure (called task structure) andcan be represented in a task plan (cf. Sacerdoti, 1977). This analysis focuses on differentaspects of the task plan and examines (i) the procedural relations holding between actions inthe task plan and their linguistic realisations, (ii) the expression of directives and (iii) theexplicit expression of goal through the use of purpose expressions. By investigating themapping of the task plan onto the grammatical level, this study looks at both function andform and aims at discovering some of the factors that influence the choice of expression ininstruction manuals. The results of the analysis for each language are comparedsystematically stressing both the similarities and the differences between Spanish and English.

The analysis of the Spanish corpus in particular adds to the existing work on instructionsin other languages (e.g., French, English, German).This contribution is made through studiesof Generation and Enablement, negative directives and purpose expressions. Other importantcontributions of the thesis include the identification of the factors underlying the choice ofdirective and purpose expressions in Spanish and English. The formal representation of thesefactors in terms of semantic networks can be useful for text generation applications. Thecomparative description of English and Spanish directive forms through a cline which showsthe degree of necessity of the actions may also prove useful for generation and translationpurposes.

This cross-linguistic study provides a better understanding of the two languages concernedwith regard to the use and function of syntactic forms frequently used in instructional texts.The results of this thesis can have applications to various areas: didactic applications toforeign language teaching (either for general or specific purposes), contributions to theimprovement of manuals writing, and applications to automatic text generation either in asingle or multiple languages.

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2. Acknowledgements

My thanks to my supervisors Dr. Antonio Len Sendra and Dr. Judy Delin for theirinspiration and support, and their comments and advice which have improved the thesistremendously. Special thanks to Judy Delins direction, encouragement and patience, and forputting me in contact with the right people. Without her, this thesis would have never takenshape. The funding I gained through the teaching and research she organised for me is alsogreatly appreciated.

Many thanks to my parents, brothers and sisters for their encouragement, patience andsupport. Special thanks to my father for li fting a big weight from my shoulders by helpingwith innumerable details regarding formatting, translation and bureaucracy throughout thewriting of this thesis and particularly in the final stages.

Special thanks also to Mick ODonnell , without whom this thesis would still be almostfinished. He was called in at a time of mental block and he helped me to a breakthrough. Hisencouragement and support have helped me through the final stages of this thesis.

My thanks to all those people who have commented on my work, especially to CcileParis, Keith Vander Linden, Donia Scott, and Marco Perestrello for their help in the buddingstage of this thesis. My thanks to John Bateman, Eija Ventola and Martin Davies forsubstantial comments on this thesis.

My thanks also to those people who have helped me throughout this thesis, especiallyValia Papoutsaki, Galit Ferguson, Angela Bradley, Ian Gilroy, and my D-21 colleagues LynnAng, Nilgun Ariturk, Seema Ginde, Kris Jozajtis, Rita Lago, John Oswald, Nicki Page, andArnold Temple who have endured my ups and downs.

I am also grateful to Lottie Gregory, Dick Johnstone and staff in SCILT for giving me thechance to have a break from my thesis and for providing a friendly ear and computer faciliti es.

Thanks to Finlay Nichol, Alison Giles and Neil Armstrong for their computer andsoftware support.

My thanks also to las nias Celia, Esther and Elvira for their help with scanning thecorpus.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the Junta de Andaluca, the European Union, theStevenson Foundation (Glasgow) and the Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores for their funding.

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A mis padres

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3. ContentsABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................................................iiACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................................iiiCONTENTS.................................................................................................................................................... vLIST OF FIGURES ...........................................................................................................................................xLIST OF TABLES ...........................................................................................................................................xiLIST OF SUMMARY TABLES .........................................................................................................................xiiLIST OF BOXES...........................................................................................................................................xiiiNOTATIONAL CONVENTIONS .....................................................................................................................xivABBREVIATIONS ......................................................................................................................................... xv

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................1

1. MOTIVATIONS FOR THE STUDY..................................................................................................................12. THE FRAMEWORK OF ANALYSIS.................................................................................................................33. THE CORPUS..............................................................................................................................................7

3.1. Corpus design..................................................................................................................................73.2. Method for collecting the data ........................................................................................................83.3. The resulting corpus......................................................................................................................103.4. Analysing the corpus.....................................................................................................................11

4. OUTLINE OF CHAPTERS............................................................................................................................12

CHAPTER TWO: APPROACHES TO CROSS-LINGUISTIC PRAGMATICS ..................................14

1. COMPARATIVE APPROACHES ...................................................................................................................141.1. Diachronic versus synchronic language comparisons..................................................................151.2. Formal versus functional language comparisons..........................................................................16

1.2.1. Formal approaches .................................................................................................................................. 171.2.1.1. Language Typology......................................................................................................................... 171.2.1.2. Contrastive Analysis and the formal approach ............................................................................... 171.2.1.3. Translation Theory and the formal approach.................................................................................. 18

1.2.2. Functional approaches............................................................................................................................. 191.2.2.1. Computational Linguistics.............................................................................................................. 191.2.2.2. Contrastive Analysis and the functional approach.......................................................................... 191.2.2.3. Contrasti