Towards a contrastive pragmatics: Syntactic choice in English and French instructions

Abstract

In this paper, we set out a framework for the description and contrastive analysis of limited-domain syntactic choice in English and French. Using a corpus of naturally-occurring English and French sets of instructional texts, we look 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 Gröte (1995), we analyse which expressions can convey each part of the semantic relation, and look at the effect contextual factors such as serial ordering have on further determining what expressions are used. Having described some differences between English and French based on these syntactic and semantic considerations, we 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. We present our approach 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.