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<Paper uid="P96-1026">
  <Title>Two Sources of Control over the Generation of Software Instructions*</Title>
  <Section position="9" start_page="196" end_page="196" type="relat">
    <SectionTitle>
9 Related Work
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The results from our linguistic analysis are consistent with other research on sublanguages in the instructions domain, in both French and English, e.g., (Kosseim and Lapalme, 1994; Paris and Scott, 1994). Our analysis goes beyond previous work by identifying within the discourse context the means for exercising explicit control over a text generator.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> An interesting difference with respect to previous descriptions is the use of the true (or direct) imperative to express an action in the procedure genre, as results from (Paris and Scott, 1994) seem to indicate that the infinitive-form of the imperative is preferred in French. These results, however, were obtained from a corpus of instructions mostly for domestic appliances as opposed to software manuals.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Furthermore the use of the infinitive-form in instructions in general as observed by (Kocourek, 1982) is declining, as some of the conventions already common in English technical writing are being adopted by French technical writers, e.g., (Timbal-Duclaux, 1990).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> We also note that the patterns of realisations uncovered in our analysis follow the principle of good technical writing practice known as the minimalist approach, e.g., (Carroll, 1994; Hammond, 1994). Moreover, we observe that our corpus does not exhibit shortcomings identified in a Systemic Functional analysis of English software manuals (Plum et al., 1990), such as a high incidence of agentless passive and a failure to distinguish the function of informing from that of instructing.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Other work has focused on the cross-linguistic realisations of two specific semantic relations (generation and enablement) (Delin et al., 1994; Delia et al., 1996), in a more general corpus of instructions for household appliances. Our work focuses on the single application domain of software instructions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> However, it takes into consideration the whole task structure and looks at the realisation of semantic elements as found in the knowledge base, instead of two semantic relations not explicitly present in the underlying semantic model.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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