A Study Of Contrastive Rhetoric Between Chinese And English Cultures Through News Commentaries

This study is intended to examine current perspectives of contrastive rhetoric about differences in rhetorical structures between Chinese and English written texts, and the cultural and philosophical factors behind these differences. Through examination of the rhetorical patterns of a representative sample of English and Chinese articles selected from some major English and Chinese newspapers, the study analyzes methods of coherence and the placement of thesis statement in both languages.The field of contrastive rhetoric which has been established around the Sapir-Whofian hypothesis and applied linguistics investigates contrasting rhetorical structures across languages with the goal of predicting the difficulties experienced by students learning to write essays in a foreign language. Past researchers have centered their study on the analysis of rhetorical structures in different languages. They seldom explored the cultural environment that helped to produce a particular style. Thus this work suggests that contrastive rhetoric should expand its study by exploring origins of cultural and philosophical characteristics which have influenced rhetorical styles of written texts in different languages and cultures.Chapter Two presents a comparative study of rhetorical styles in Chinese and English and the cultural factors that have influenced the styles of written texts in the perspective languages. Comparing rhetorical aspects of Confucianism in china with Aristotelianrhetorical tradition in English cultures, it explored culturally-embedded world views and ways of thinking, and explained how these various characteristics have influenced the rhetorical styles of written texts for the very different cultures. It also examined the structures of the eight-legged essay and the qi-cheng-zhuan-he style. The study shows that writers are deeply influenced by their cultural environment to use different rhetorical structures in their articles.Chapter Three is a statistical test of the rhetorical differences between Chinese and English cultures. A corpus of twenty newspaper commentaries were collected and examined. The twenty commentaries are mainly editorials, ten of which are from major newspapers published in the mainland of China and the other ten of which are from English language newspapers published in the United States, Great Britain, Singapore and Hong Kong. Methods used to examine these texts are Kaplan's discourse bloc analysis and Lautamatti's topical structure analysis. The results indicate that English and Chinese texts have different rhetorical patterns.Chapter Four concludes the paper by answering the two questions put forward in the first chapter. The study shows that Chinese newspaper commentaries tend to employ a different rhetorical style from their English counterpart. These differences are caused by different cultural and philosophical traditions between these two cultures. Based on the findings of this quantitative research, this chapter discusses some pedagogical implications of a cross-cultural understandings of rhetoric, and offers suggestions to teachers of ESL compositions.