Stylistic Features Of English Instructions For Instruments

With the deepening of the global economic integration and speeding-up development of the science and technology, people’s living standards are improved and all kinds of technology products come out. Especially when China has joined the WTO, more and more foreign commodities are entering China, and at the same time more and more Chinese enterprises are promoting their products on the international markets for the competition, development and innovation. From a small music player to a large-scale precision&scientific instrument can reflect people’s physical and spiritual life. English as the world’s most widely used language plays an important role in products introduction and marketing. Properly written instructions can help users correctly understand the product and buy it, which promotes the production and sales. Most important of all, in malpractice of a large-scale instrument or electronic equipment incorrectly due to the vagueness from introduction, not only can it leads to large economic losses but unnecessary physical dangers. For an increasingly powerful China, the quality of English instructions plays a big role in products exporting. Consequently, it makes the stylistic features of English instructions become the research focus.There are17authoritative English instructions selected for this study. First of all, this thesis focuses on some definitions in EST in detail and points out the research target. Current research status about stylistic features of English instruction for instruments at home and abroad is reviewed in the first chapter. And then based on Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar theory and register theory, it analyzes and generalizes the stylistic features of English instruction for instruments from the perspective of lexical level, syntactic level, discourse level and the level of non-verbal expressions. The proved conclusion is all based on the reliable data by using quantitative analysis and descriptive method. In the conclusion part, some specific features of instrument instructions and five writing principles are put forward: principle of clarity, principle of simplicity, principle of completeness, principle of appropriateness and principle of hierarchy. At last, some limitations are indicated for the future progress.