| Expository essays are compositions focusing on exposition, whose purpose is to explain or to provide readers with information to help them understand the world around them. Expository essays give answers to such questions as "how", "why" and so on. They are among the most frequently used genres that we often encounter and use in our daily life. When we read newspapers we will face them as well as when we read books. Various instructions, directions of use, even recipes for cooking all belong to expository writings. Expository essays play an important role in varieties of English tests that Chinese students are faced with. Although many Chinese scholars maintain that Chinese and English writers have not much to differ in writing expository essays, it is unluckily found that it is still difficult to understand English expository essays for many Chinese students who are familiar with Chinese expository essays and have studied English for quite a few years. This is of course connected with more than one factor. However, it is undoubtedly helpful to seek the similarities and differences of English and Chinese expository essays in structures through contrastive studies. The aim of writing this paper rightly lies in investigating these similarities and differences at the globaland local levels by means of effective analyses, expecting to provide some help for Chinese readers in their reading English expository essays. This paper only takes scientific expository essays as the objective of analysis for the time prevents the author from making an analysis of all types of expository essays within the scope of one paper. This paper is made up of four chapters. Chapter One is an introduction. Firstly, a short introduction is presented to contrastive linguistics and text linguistics. Then, it is presented how contrastive discourse studies based on the two previously mentioned branches have developed in China. In the 3rd section of Chapter One, the author states the purpose of choosing this topic. Chapter Two is the theoretical framework of this paper. It gives a sketchy introduction to Rhetorical Structure Theory, including its fundamental viewpoints and the procedure of analysis together with the advantages of this theory in discourse analysis. Chapter Three is a concrete analysis. The 1st section of this chapter provides some background information, including the background information to the data, concepts discrimination and the methodology of the analysis. The author selects the data on Krzezowski's 'tertium comparationis', that is, to prevent 'comparisons of incomparables', it is necessary to require each pair of the sample texts (a) to be written in the same register and (b) to represent the same literary style and (c) to deal with the same/similar topic. In concepts discrimination, the authorconcisely distinguishes two pairs of concepts: discourse vs text and hypostxis vs parataxis. In the method of analysis, the author adopts the global and local analyses. Subsequent to the background, the author makes contrastive analyses at the global and local levels. The result of the global analysis is as follows: Both English and Chinese scientific expository essays have RST analyses; they both follow the similar textual pattern---general-particular pattern in combination with matching pattern. The findings gained from the local analysis are that: English scientific expository essays stresses hypotaxis, while the Chinese counterparts put emphasis on parataxis; the former uses more subordination and less coordination than the latter. This part constitutes the main body of the paper. Chapter Four is conclusion and discussion, summarizing the analytical results and discussing the reasons underlying them. Firstly, both English and Chinese scientific expository essays have RST analyses, which is of high importance. The nature of relations is functional, which enables the analyst to discover the writer's purposes at different levels of text, and sets the foundation of coherence of text. Seco... |
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