Junktionsstrategien in deutschen und englischen Online-Hilfen für Softwareprogramme

From a comparative perspective this article will focus on instructions as a key feature in manuals and examine how they are encoded in German and English online-manuals for the software application SAP for Higher Education & Research. In chapter 1 we will give a detailed text-type description and discuss external and internal text characteristics. Chapter 2 describes the English and German online-corpus. In chapter 3 we will present Raible’s "model of conjunction" (1992) as an appropriate model to analyse the syntax of instructions. The quantitative analysis shows (chap. 4) that a preference for conditional relations between two propositions is evident in both corpora. Furthermore, the data reveal that subordination is the clearly favoured technique in both online-manuals. From this we conclude that a more verbal style is preferred by which two propositions are expressed in an explicit manner. Finally, the comparative approach indicates that the English online-manual serves as a model for choices in the lexical and pragmatic domain of the German online-manual (chap. 5). This is especially the case, where text understanding and information retrieval is made easier.