Discourse Analysis On English Car Manuals -An Application Of Functional Grammar Genre And Move Structure

With the sustained economic growth and the increasing steps of globalization, more and more Chinese cars have been exported to foreign countries;meanwhile lots of foreign vehicles are imported to facilitate people’s life. English car manualplays an important role in offering guidance to their readers for the safety of the occupants.Compared with other parts of the car manual, the occupant safety part is organized by fix structure using concise words with illustrations and signs to provide important safety information to the customers. Therefore, it is important and practical to study the generic structure and functional features of this part.To achieve this aim, first, the generic structure of the car manual is analyzed based on Swales’genre analysis theory, with the explanation of the obligatory moves and the optional moves. After the investigation, it can be found that there are four obligatory moves in the car manuals’ occupant safety part namely: Introduction (In), Airbags (Ab), Seat Belts (SB), Children Restraint Systems (CRS) and two optional moves:Seat Position (SP), Preventative Occupant Safety(POS). Second,the occupant safety part of the car manual is also studiedwith the application of Halliday’s functional grammar to describe the stylistic features of this part, which reveals that the car manual’s occupant safety part adopts the material process, relational process and verbal process frequently. Imperative sentences, modality words and adverbial phrases are the main strategies involved in order to achieve its communicative purposes.Through the study of car manuals’ occupant safety part with the combination of genre theory and grammar function, this thesis hopes to give guidance to English car manual understanding.