A Typological Approach To The Analysis Of Errors In The Instructional Discourses On Hair Dyeing Products

With the progression of globalization, English, as a common language, has been widely applied to the instructional discourses on various products in China. Most recently, this kind of practical writings has aroused much attention in the field of discourse analysis. A close look at the previous studies reveals that till now only English instructional discourses on the following products such as cosmetics, medicines and equipments have been investigated, but those on hair dyeing products have scarcely been examined. Moreover, most of those studies have explored their genre structures and stylistic features. Contrastively a small body of research studies has focused on errors in this kind of discourses.According to Li&Thompson (1976), typologically speaking, English is a subject-prominent language while Chinese is a topic-prominent language. Up to the present, many scholars have devoted to the investigation on topic-prominence in the Chinese-English interlanguage. The goal of this study is to explore the typological errors in English instructional discourses on hair dyeing products, trying to conclude the characteristics of these discourses in China and thus giving some implications to their discourse producers.Based on the typological differences between English and Chinese, in combination with the theories of contrastive and error analyses, the current study carries out a research into a corpus of60English instructional discourses on hair dyeing products. First, the following three topic-prominent constructions, that is, Double-subject Constructions, Empty Element Constructions and Absence of Definite Article "the", are coded and tagged. Then, the distributions and frequencies of the typological errors are observed and counted by employing the text analysis software AntConc3.2.4. Next, the percentages of these typological errors are calculated by using the Descriptive Statistics function of the statistical analysis software SPSS16.0for Windows.The statistical results indicate that at present English instructional discourses on hair dyeing products in China have the following four characteristics.(1) Double-subject Constructions (45.5%) and Empty Element Constructions (44%) are strongly present, while Absence of Definite Article "the"(10.5%) is relatively less present.(2) NPT Double-subject Constructions, holding70.4%of Double-subject Constructions, are the most marked. VPT (17.1%) and CT (12.5%) Double-subject Constructions are less marked.61.6%of English instructional discourses on hair dyeing products contain NPT Double-subject Constructions, but those that include VPT and CT Double-subject Constructions hold the same percentage, that is,26.7%.(3) Empty Object Constructions (59.2%) are slightly more frequent than Empty Subject Constructions (40.8%).55%of English instructional discourses on hair dyeing products contain ESC while46.7%of English instructional discourses on hair dyeing products contain EOC.(4) With regard to the six sub error types---NPT, VPT, CT, ESC, EOC, ADA, the order of their percentages from the high to the low is NPT (32%)> EOC (26%)> ESC (18%)> ADA (11%)> VPT (7.8%)> CT (5.2%).In the end, on the basis of the statistical results, in-depth qualitative analyses are conducted on concrete and typical topic-prominent constructions in English instructional discourses on hair dyeing products, with the purpose of getting a deeper understanding of the typological errors in this kind of discourses.