First Advisor

Jeanette S. DeCarrico

Term of Graduation

Winter 1991

Date of Publication

3-29-1991

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (M.A.) in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

Department

Applied Linguistics

Language

English

Subjects

English language -- Verb phrase, Technical manuals, Technical writing

DOI

10.15760/etd.6065

Physical Description

1 online resource (2, v, 117 pages)

Abstract

This study investigates the use of phrasal verbs and their lexical counterparts (i.e. nouns with a lexical structure and meaning similar to corresponding phrasal verbs) in technical manuals from three perspectives: (1) that such two-word items might be more frequent in technical writing than in general texts; (2) that these two-word items might have particular functions in technical writing; and that (3) frequencies of these items might vary according to the presumed expertise of the text's audience.

The technical manual was studied because it is the fundamental genre of technical writing and is applicable to a wide audience. Both "lay" manuals (written for the general public) and "expert" manuals (written for specialists) were considered and compared to a general, informal text (the daily newspaper) to examine the issue of audience expertise. Corpora of 36,000 words were analyzed for two-word items in these genres in terms of frequency, figurative level (figurative vs. non-figurative items) and lexical variance (ratio of types to tokens). Additionally, in the two technical manual corpora, the rhetorical function of sentences with two-word items, the semantic contribution of the particle component, and the common semantic fields of two-word items were analyzed to determine their function in technical discourse.

Results of the frequency counts and rhetorical function analysis suggest that these items play an important role in technical manuals. This role is not as "pragmatic markers of informality" as has been claimed for phrasal verbs in less specific discourse contexts. This study's figurative level analysis shows that the majority of two-word items in technical manuals, unlike more general texts, are non-figurative, and neutral in regard to formality. In technical manuals therefore, the role of two-word items is almost exclusively semantic: they seem to provide additional orientation and/or precision. However, between the two sub-genres of technical manuals, the ratio of phrasal verbs to their lexical counterparts varies meaningfully, with phrasal verbs being predominant in the "lay'! manuals and lexical counterparts appearing more frequently in the "expert" corpus. Implications of this variance are discussed and considered in terms of appropriate instructional strategies for different clients.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Comments

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this dissertation or thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to pdxscholar@pdx.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/24044

Download

Share

COinS