A Rhetorical Analysis of English Instructional Text

Jassim Muhammad, Manaal

	A Rhetorical Analysis of English Instructional Text
Alustath
Article 1, Volume 0, Issue 85, 2012, Pages 469-496
Author
Manaal Jassim Muhammad
Abstract
Instructional texts exhibit certain characteristics that make them interesting for natural language processing, and particularly for natural language generation. Instructional texts are widely available and understandable by many readers and are usually well structured. Compared to other narrative texts, they can be represented more objectively. This representation is generally viewed by means of rhetorical relations between states and operations of instructional texts. More specifically, it is commonly and productively viewed as a hierarchy of operations. Consider the following examples: Telephone instruction When instructed, remove phone by firmly grasping top of handset and pulling out. Return to seat to place calls. Stay safe of wheels Wear a safety helmet, your helmet is your most important piece of kit. It will help to protect your head if you fall off your bike! You should never ride without it, even the top cyclists wear them and they come in loads of cool designs!. Rhetorical relations can be described functionally in terms of the purposes of the writer and the writer's assumptions about the reader. Each rhetorical relation is defined in terms of a distinctive set of constraints on the information presented in the segments related and those segments combinations, on the reader belief states, and on the effect that the writer is attempting to achieve with the relation. Rhetorical relations are the central constructs of Rhetorical Structure Theory (henceforth RST). RST is a theory of text organization which provides an extensive set of rhetorical relations, a set from which writers systematically choose the particular forms that they feel will produce most effective and communicative texts. Instructional texts exhibit a rich micro-rhetorical structures integrated into the syntactic-semantic structures of instructions. The current study addresses this issue in the context of expressing procedural relations between actions in instructional text, i.e., in written procedural directions. It is hypothesized that expressing rhetorical relations in instructional texts might add new dimensions to the understanding of instructions. However, this set of relations is rather limited to the whole spectrum of RST relations.

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