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English, French and Portugese Instructions
Judy Delin
Stirling University
When: Tuesday, 18th February 1997
Time: 11:00am
Where: Room E6A357, Macquarie University
Abstract:
Given a message to convey, how do we decide how to phrase it? In this talk, I introduce a framework for the description and contrastive analysis of limited-domain syntactic choice in instructional texts, examining some factors that determine such choices in English, French, and Portuguese. The research is the work of an interdisciplinary team consisting of myself and Profs. Donia Scott and Tony Hartley of the ITRI, University of Brighton, UK. The aim of the research is to examine the implications of linguistic variability at the level of pragmatics for the purposes of multi-lingual document generation.
Using a corpus of naturally-occurring sets of instructions, I look first of all at the expressions available in each language for conveying the two procedural semantic relations of GENERATION and ENABLEMENT (cf. Goldman 1970). Following an approach first set out in Delin et al (1994) and refined by Grote 1995, we analysed which expressions can convey each part of the semantic relation, and look at the effect of contextual factors such as serial ordering on further determining what expressions are used. Having described some differences between the languages of study based on these syntactic and semantic considerations, I go on to discuss how rhetorical and pragmatic factors will further constrain the choice between the small sets of expressions remaining in individual functional slots. The approach is presented as a formal and replicable means of stating the rules for syntactic choice within languages, which, additionally, can form a solid basis for inter-language comparison.
Enquiries: sals@mri.mq.edu.au
| Last modified: July 1997 |