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

Whenever we open a household appliance (or any other mechanical or electrical product, such as a toy) we can find a user's manual; this can be a leaflet or an 80-page book. In any case, we agree to name it instruction/user's manual and we treat it as a unit. This communication presents a research done with the purpose of establishing the rhetorical structure of instruction manuals for household appliances and to contrast the differences in two languages, Spanish and English. With this commitment we have complied a 52-text bilingual corpus divided into two comparable subcorpora following Sinclair's (1991) and Leech's (1996) ideas on corpus linguistics as well as other scholars.The theoretical framework for this contrastive study is based on macro-linguistics. We have taken the notion of genre to approach the corpus and considered instruction manuals as one more of them. This macro-linguistic perspective is based on Swales (1993), , Halliday and Hasan (1989), Werlich (1983), and Bhatia's (1993, 2004) notions. Then, as the communicative process (Shannon, 1948) and the pragmatic relations are similar in every case, we have been able to preform a rhetoric analysis from a twofold perspective: qualitative and quantitative.On the qualitative side of the analysis, we have determined the prototypical structure, following and adapting Swales model (1993) to the instructional genre, and according to it we have tagged the corpus into moves, steps and sub-steps. On the quantitative side of the analysis, we have looked for the significance of the different moves, steps and sub-steps in numerical terms and percentages. This raw information needs interpretation, and the conclusion will extract it from the differences and similarities in terms of priorities in one language and the other.