Contrastive Rhetoric: A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Book Review Genre

Writing, as an important form of human communication, is embedded in cultures (Connor, 1996). Studies in contrastive rhetoric have greatly multiplied in recent years. Several studies have pointed out some differences between Chinese and English writing at the discoursal level. Much of the previous research, however, has dealt with expository writing. Unlike those previous studies, this research focuses on book reviews.Despite the wealth of research on contrastive rhetoric, few researchers have focused on the genre of book reviews. The present study aims at shedding some light on what has always been "a somewhat neglected genre" (Hyland 2000) in the literature by carrying out an English -Chinese contrastive study on rhetorical structure at the macro-linguistic level and on rhetorical features of evaluation in book reviews at the micro-linguistic level. The purpose of this research is to investigate the influence of culture on text texture by comparing English and Chinese academic book reviews in terms of rhetorical strategiesThe corpus of the study consists of 20 book reviews in English and 20 book reviews in Chinese, each group drawn from four different journals. The present study investigated the cultural differences in English and Chinese book reviews by combining Motta-Roth (1995)'s and Hyland (2000)'s analytical frameworks. Motta-Roth (1995) analyzed the rhetorical structure of book reviews from a macro-linguistic level, and Hyland (2000) investigated the rhetorical feature of evaluation in book reviews from a micro-linguistic level.The results of the study indicated that there are significant differences between the book reviews of the two languages. At the macro-linguistic level, English book reviews tend to be more descriptive since the descriptive move appears to be the longest part in most of the book reviews. On the other hand, Chinese book reviews seem to be more evaluative because most reviewers dedicate the largest portion of texts to evaluation in Chinese corpus. At the micro-linguistic level, English reviewwriters prefer more direct and overt critical speech acts, while Chinese reviewers show much tendency to full praises and indirect criticism. It claims that the cultural differences between English-speaking and Chinese-speaking communities are directly responsible for differences in the rhetorical structure and evaluation features in English and Chinese book reviews.This study provided interesting results, at the micro-linguistic and macro-linguistic levels, as well as further insights into culture-bound rhetorical patterns. Since few studies have been done on book review from a contrastive perspective in the literature, the analysis of our corpus will offer a number of useful starting points for further research. For the purpose of the present study, this paper has modified and improved the analytical framework made by Motta-Roth, which I believe, will be useful reference for future research.