Abstract:
The present research aims to investigate the influence of discourse community on the
communicative purposes of the genre. The study seeks to reveal how a change in the
communicative purpose affects genre membership. It explores the genre of instructions in the
technical field, focusing namely on user and service manuals. The research sheds light on the
genre of instructions as it addresses a wide range of audience who are members of a discourse
community, varying from a general to a very specific one, and explains how technical
information, represented by instructions, is conveyed to different types of audience, namely the
laymen and technicians respectively. Hence, it is hypothesizes that a change in the discourse
community will lead to a change in the communicative purposes of the communicative event. In
other words, user manuals will have different communicative purposes by changing the
community to which they are addressed.The methodology is based on a corpus-based analysis of
a sample of thirty user and service manuals representing different products that are available in
the Algerian context. First, the moves used to structure the genre are identified manually. Then,
the data is processed using different text analysis tools to determine the linguistic features
including sentence type and the lexical sets used to construct the identified moves. The results
obtained from both types of manuals are compared to find out the changes resulting by moving
from a general to a specific discourse community. The study reveals that the change of the
discourse community could affect the communicative purpose of such genre. However, it does
not lead to a completely different set of communicative purposes; hence, the two types of
manuals share some of the communicative purposes because they share, to a great extent, the
same pattern of moves that reflects the intended communicative purposes. In addition, the
differences between the two types of manuals make it clear that the change that may occur at the
level of communicative purpose does not necessarily affect the genre class and thus does not
gives us a different kind of genre.
