Intercultural Rhetorical Studies In Argumentative Discourse: English VS. Chinese

This dissertation is mainly devoted to an intercultural study of English and Chinese argumentative writing. It makes use of some relevant approaches adopted in contrastive rhetoric as its analytical framework, and lays its theoretical basis on the key concepts examined in modern argumentation research. This study first gives a brief account of the achievements as well as the deficiency in the contrastive study of English and Chinese and a general review of the major approaches in the research field of modern argumentation. It aims to examine both the homogeneous and the heterogeneous features of English and Chinese argumentative discourses in light of some important factors conductive to these features, including culture, rhetoric, thought patterns, reasoning strategy, etc. It presents an exploratory study of the interrelationships among both English and Chinese fundamental modes of traditional thinking, linguistic features, rhetorical patterns, modes of argumentation that are relevant to the understanding of contemporary argumentative discourse. Through a quantitative analysis of the statistics selected from the English and Chinese argumentative discourses, it has made an attempt to produce a reliable framework to measure the strength and validity of argumentation in light of the distinct features in English and Chinese argumentative writing.As an important field of intercultural study in applied linguistics, contrastive rhetoric has yielded remarkable achievements in the study of English and Chinese rhetorics, and the research in modern argumentation theories also seems to be fruitful. However, there is still an obvious scarcity in the contrastive study of English and Chinese argumentative writing, and lots of controversial problems are still left...