A model of the operations manual speech genre in engineering communication

The article addresses basic genre parameters of the operations manual and aims to develop its genre model within engineering discourse. Engineering communication is becoming a subject of a special focus for linguists due to its rapid development driven by dynamic changes in technology, society and industry, which results in continuous exchange of information between the members of the engineering society. Despite the significant number of studies in the field of certain institutional discourses, the genre structure of engineering discourse, one of the promising fields of communicative linguistics, is still a research challenge due to insufficient studies of the engineering discourse as well as the professional communication in general. Since discourse is embodied in certain genres, and genres, in turn, are always included into a certain discourse field, the author proposes the idea that the engineering discourse provides a number of core genres which reflect the values, strategies and information of engineering communication. The research is based on the texts of operations manuals for the equipment produced by Russian manufacturers. The analysis of genre parameters and lexical aspects has revealed a number of key characteristics of the operations manual as well as its peculiar linguistic presentation as of a specific genre of engineering communication. The analysis proves that the operation manual genre meets the primary goal of professional communication in the engineering field. The peculiar characteristics of the studied genre are determined by the professional communicative purposes and the situation. The results of the research may be used in university lectures on professional communication, cognitive linguistics and cognitive terminology studies.

Strictifying and taming directed paths in Higher Dimensional Automata

Directed paths have been used by several authors to describe concurrent executions of a program. Spaces of directed paths in an appropriate state space contain executions with all possible legal schedulings. It is interesting to investigate whether one obtains different topological properties of such a space of executions if one restricts attention to schedulings with “nice” properties, e.g. involving synchronisations. This note shows that this is not the case, i.e. that one may operate with nice schedulings without inflicting any harm. Several of the results in this note had previously been obtained by Ziemiański in Ziemiański (2017. Applicable Algebra in Engineering, Communication and Computing28 497–525; 2020a. Journal of Applied and Computational Topology4 (1) 45–78). We attempt to make them accessible for a wider audience by giving an easier proof for these findings by an application of quite elementary results from algebraic topology; notably the nerve lemma.

Multimedia Thesaurus: A Case of Designing and Prospects for Using in Engineering Education

The paper deals with the technology for the creation and use of an individual multimedia bilingual thesaurus as a tool for the integration of the foreign language and engineering disciplines at a technical university. The stages of designing and testing an individual thesaurus in vocational English language classes with students, majoring in automobile engineering, are described. Building on the achievements in thesaurus modelling in integrative foreign languages and professional disciplines teaching, the author presents her own technology for creating an individual English-Russian multimedia thesaurus, devoted to the automobile design, and the sequence of formation of speech skills in foreign language communication of engineers on its basis. The process of creating such thesaurus takes place at two levels of integration: intra-subject (interrelationship of all types of speech activity) and interdisciplinary (didactic synthesis of language and engineering disciplines). At the same time, the author outlines the areas of the near and further integration of the discipline «Professional English» and engineering disciplines, which is aimed at developing interdisciplinary thinking of engineering students. The author emphasizes the fact that successful teaching cross-cultural engineering communication requires outlining the content of learning situations, the modelling of which is the English language instructor’s responsibility. In order to organize this work, students are supposed to create a contextual part of the thesaurus from which the instructor singles out speech patterns. The selected speech patterns are mastered in a series of exercises and tasks prior to learning situations. The conclusion outlines ways of the further interdisciplinary integration by means of thesaurus modelling of professional subject areas.