Counterarguments In English And Chinese Editorials: A Contrastive Study And Its Implications For ESL Writing

Using the five-paragraph student essay as a point of departure and based on a contrastive study on counterarguments in 90 English and Chinese editorials, this dissertation argues that (1) the usual student fear of counterarguments messing up the flow of their writing is not warranted albeit understandable; (2) counterarguments do not undermine text coherence, on the contrary they strengthen it; and (3) counterarguments do not weaken the main argument and on the contrary strengthen it by engaging the reader in critical thinking. Implicitly, this dissertation contends that the problems inherent in the five-paragraph essay can be successfully solved when counterarguments are introduced into the writing process.The first point is corroborated by this contrastive study on the way counterarguments are integrated into the main argument for textual cohesion in English and Chinese editorials. Applying Halliday and Hasan's (1976/2001) cohesion theory to this contrastive analysis, supplemented by insights from Hoey (1991/2000), Halliday (1994/2000), McCarthy and Carter (1994/2004), McCarthy (1991/2002, 2001), and others, this dissertation shows that among all the devices used for cohesion purposes, reference, conjunction, and lexical cohesion represent the primary means of integrating counterarguments into the main argument for both sets of the editorial data. But underneath the veneer of similarities, there are striking differences as well in the frequency of the three types of cohesive devices used in both groups of the editorials. For the integration of counterarguments in English editorials, references constitute 18% of all the cohesive devices used while for Chinese editorials that number is only 7%. This finding suggests that English uses far more referential nouns and pronouns for purposes of textual cohesion. For conjunctives used in English editorials, they represent only 24% of all the devices used while in Chinese editorials the number reaches 40%. As far as lexical cohesion is concerned, while it is used more than half of the times in both sets of the data, with 57% for English editorials and 53% for Chinese editorials, English has shown much more lexical variation as demonstrated by...