A Corpus-based Genre Study of Instruction Manuals for Household Appliances

Of technical writing, instructions for use as a specialised genre and discourse communities

“…Given this extensive range, procedural texts unsurprisingly encompass a variety of subgenres according to technicity and length, resulting in a medley of overlapping terms: user manuals, user handbooks, user guides, owner's manuals, service manuals, directions for use, instructions for use, operating instructions, etc. Frutos (2015), overriding potential terminological incongruities, suggests that whether "a leaflet or an 80-page book" (2015: 103), the term "manual" should be retained as a generic term for all procedural texts. The collection of texts used for the purposes of this study being composed essentially of single A4s or folding leaflets, the term "manual," connotative as it is of a lengthy text whether book, CD or DVD, goes against the grain of our linguist's sensibilities.…”

The Complexity of Relative Clause’s Position in Fiction and Non-Fiction Text

“…Two important things of corpus linguistics are: first, there appears to be a new focus on spoken languagethis is beginning to receive the same sort of attention that the written language has received so far and a second important recent development is a renewed interest in and discussion of questions of methodology [7]. A corpus is 'a collection of naturally occurring language text, chosen to characterize a state or variety of a language' as well as 'a sufficiently large body of naturally occurring data of the language to be investigated' [8].…”