Author and reader in Instructions for use

Instructions for use should not be seen as merely instrumental-they should also persuade the reader to read the text and to act accordingly. Moreover, they should establish a positive image of the product and the manufacturer. In this paper, a collection of instructions for use is used to identify strategies that technical writers apply to fulfill these `rhetorical' demands; especially strategies that involve the author-reader relationship. The analysis shows that the implied author's role is not only that of a neutral instructor, but also that of a teacher or a salesman. The reader is not only addressed as a technical `operator', but also as a `user' who applies the product in a `real-life task'. The analysis also shows that technical writers sometimes use subtle politeness strategies to compensate for `face threatening acts' (FTAs). However, all of these rhetorical strategies seem to be applied very unsystematically and often clumsily. The conclusion is that technical writers may be aware of rhetorical demands for their documents, but that the instrumental function still is paramount in their eye

Lexical Negation in Czech Initial Education–Negative Imperatives from the Teacher's Mouth

AbstractThe cognitive psychology research state the direct relationship between thinking and other cognitive processes. Change to positive thinking influences change toward experiencing positive emotions, positive interpretation of events, evocation of positive memories. External manifestation of thinking is speech. We start from the position of positive psychology and ask the following question: Do we speak positively? It is really difficult to reliably answer, therefore a procedure by Carl Raimund Popper was chosen, based on the evidence in the form of falsification, and we formulated hypothesis: we speak negatively unnecessarily. This paper focuses on the exposure of lexical negative verbs in the teachers’ speech. A frequency analysis of the Czech National Corpus SCHOLA2010 was done. Corpus contains transcript of spoken language from 204 lessons of Czech initial education (representative selection). There were 9377 lexical negative verbs identified, 409 of them in the form of imperative. Top ten imperatives are: do not worry (49 occurrences), do not forget (44), do not say (26), do not write (24), do not talk (13), do not do (12), do not be naughty (9), do not be (8), do not pack (6), do not give (6). All founded imperatives can be (from a lexical point of view) positively reformulated, while maintaining the meaning) positively reformulated.ConclusionAnalysis of teaching process in initial education in the Czech Republic in terms of lexically negative imperative verbs, suggests that Czech teachers do use negative imperatives unnecessarily. The article discusses some of the psychological consequences of these findings

Trialing project-based learning in a new EAP ESP course: A collaborative reflective practice of three college English teachers

Currently in many Chinese universities, the traditional College English course is facing the risk of being ‘marginalized’, replaced or even removed, and many hours previously allocated to the course are now being taken by EAP or ESP. At X University in northern China, a curriculum reform as such is taking place, as a result of which a new course has been created called ‘xue ke’ English. Despite the fact that ‘xue ke’ means subject literally, the course designer has made it clear that subject content is not the target, nor is the course the same as EAP or ESP. This curriculum initiative, while possibly having been justified with a rationale of some kind (e.g. to meet with changing social and/or academic needs of students and/or institutions), this is posing a great challenge for, as well as considerable pressure on, a number of College English teachers who have taught this single course for almost their entire teaching career. In such a context, three teachers formed a peer support group in Semester One this year, to work collaboratively co-tackling the challenge, and they chose Project-Based Learning (PBL) for the new course. This presentation will report on the implementation of this project, including the overall designing, operational procedure, and the teachers’ reflections. Based on discussion, pre-agreement was reached on the purpose and manner of collaboration as offering peer support for more effective teaching and learning and fulfilling and pleasant professional development. A WeChat group was set up as the chief platform for messaging, idea-sharing, and resource-exchanging. Physical meetings were supplementary, with sound agenda but flexible time, and venues. Mosoteach cloud class (lan mo yun ban ke) was established as a tool for virtual learning, employed both in and after class. Discussions were held at the beginning of the semester which determined only brief outlines for PBL implementation and allowed space for everyone to autonomously explore in their own way. Constant further discussions followed, which generated a great deal of opportunities for peer learning and lesson plan modifications. A reflective journal, in a greater or lesser detailed manner, was also kept by each teacher to record the journey of the collaboration. At the end of the semester, it was commonly recognized that, although challenges existed, the collaboration was overall a success and they were all willing to continue with it and endeavor to refine it to be a more professional and productive approach

Imperativeness in Recommendations for Protection Against the Coronavirus

In addition to changing the daily lives of the world population and strengthening internet communications, the COVID-19 pandemic has also influenced the language we use in daily communication. In this paper, on the example of recommendations for the prevention of the spread of the disease and protection of health issued by the National and Regional Civil Protection Headquarters, we focus on the morphosyntactic aspects of addressing the citizens. Qualitative analysis of the corpus reveals that different means of expressing imperativeness are used depending on the illocutionary strength of the message itself. The most frequent means are imperatives, particularly during certain stages of the fight against the coronavirus, which testifies to the severity of the situation (‘state of war’). Infinitives and infinitives accompanied by modal verbs such as ‘trebati’ (‘need’), ‘morati’ (‘must’), ‘valjati’ (‘must/should’) are also frequent means of expressing the expected reaction, and they are used when the recipient is irrelevant (depersonalised) and the sender wishes to downtone the imperativeness of the message. Depersonalised structures have also proven to be frequent in various decisions relating to the introduction and cessation of various measures. Polite means of expressing imperativeness are the least frequent among the identified means, which suggests the importance of understanding the message about protecting oneself and others, and even more importantly, of behaving in accordance with it

Requests in films and in efl textbooks: a comparison

Research in the field of interlanguage pragmatics has shown that foreign language learners’ grammatical and pragmatic competences do not always match, this can perhaps be due to a lack of appropriate pragmatic presentation in current EFL textbooks. Hence, there seems to be a necessity of bringing authentic discourse into the classroom. One of the possibilities could be using films as input to develop classroom tasks. In this paper we analyse and compare the type, strategy and frequency of requests in both textbooks and films, in order to realise whether they provide an adequate treatment of this pragmatic issue. Results show an insufficient, unreal, decontextualised, and pragmatically inappropriate use of requesting strategies in the EFL textbooks analysed. We therefore propose using scenes from films as an authentic and motivating type of material which provides instances of real use of language and presents different requests in contextualised situations.Comunidad Valenciana GV-00-147-0

A Computational Linguistic Approach towards Understanding Wikipedia\u27s Article for Deletion (AfD) Discussions

With the thriving of online deliberation, Wikipedia\u27s Article for Deletion (AfD) discussion has drawn a number of researchers\u27 attention in the past decade. In this thesis we aim to solve two main problems: 1) how to help new users effectively participate in the discussion; and 2) how to make it efficient for administrators to make decision based on the discussion. To solve the first problem, we obtain a knowledge repository for new users by recognizing imperatives. We propose a method to detect imperatives based on syntactic analysis of the texts. And the result shows a good precision and reasonable recall. To solve the second problem, we propose a decision making support system that provides administrators with an reorganized overview of a discussion. We first divide the arguments in the discussion into several groups based on similarity; then further divide each group into subgroups based on sentiment (positive, neutral and negative). In order to classify sentiment polarity, we propose a recursive algorithm based on the dependency structure of the text. Comparing with the state of the art sentiment analysis tool by Stanford, our algorithm shows a promising result of 3-categories classification without requiring a large training dataset

Goals and Actions in Natural Language Instructions

Human agents are extremely flexible in dealing with Natural Language instructions: they are able both to adapt the plan they are developing to the input instructions, and vice versa, to adapt the input instructions to the plan they are developing. Borrowing the term from [Lewis 1979], I call this two-way adaptation process accommodation. In this proposal, I first define accommodation in the context of processing instructions. I then provide evidence for the particular inferences I advocate, and for the further claim that such inferences are directed by the goal to achieve which certain action is performed. The evidence I provide comes from my analysis of naturally occurring instructions, and in particular of purpose clauses and of negative imperatives. Finally, I propose a computational model of instructions able to support accommodation inferences. Such model is composed of: a speaker / hearer model of imperatives, based on the one presented in [Cohen and Levesque 90]; an action representation formalism based on a hybrid system, á la KRYPTON [Brachman et al. 1983a], whose primitives are those proposed in [Jackendoff 1990]; and inference mechanisms that contribute to building the structure of the intentions that the agent develops while interpreting instructions

Doctors’ Pragmatic Identity Construction Based on The Doctors

In recent years, conflicts between doctors and patients in China have occurred from time to time. In the past, some scholars conducted research on the doctor-patient relationship, but there are few studies on doctors’ pragmatic identity construction. Therefore, guided by Chen Xinren’s pragmatic identity theory, using python as an analytical aid, this paper uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis to conduct a study of doctor’s pragmatic identity construction based on a medical documentary The Doctors. The main focus of this study is not only the types of pragmatic identity constructed by doctors in the documentary, but also the emotional characteristics of these pragmatic identities. According to this research, the doctors in the documentary The Doctors mainly construct expert identity, peer identity, and stress bearer identity. The overall emotional characteristics of the constructed pragmatic identities are neutral, and positive emotions are greater than negative ones. This paper has certain research significance. For one thing, this study provides a new research perspective for doctors’ pragmatic identity construction, that is, to study the overall emotional characteristics of the constructed identities. For another, this study can help the public understand the pragmatic identity of doctors to a certain extent, and promote the harmonious relationship between doctors and patients