English Argumentative Writings By English And Chinese Natives: A Cultural Approach To Contrastive Rhetoric

In research on second language writing, contrastive rhetoric (CR), pioneered by American scholar Robert Kaplan in the 1960s, has received a great deal of attention. CR maintains that language and writing are cultural phenomena and that each language has rhetorical conventions unique to it. The present thesis explores the English-Chinese CR research,which is relatively new and unknown in China, by contrasting the rhetorical patterns in English argumentative writings by English and Chinese natives. It intends to investigate current perspectives of contrastive rhetoric which has been established around the Whorfian hypothesis of linguistic relativity and Kaplan's view about the difference between the direct linear structure of English discourse and the indirect spiraling structure of culturally typical Chinese discourse. Comparing rhetorical aspects of Confucianism in China with Aristotelian rhetoric in Anglo-American countries, this study suggests that current contrastive rhetoric should expand its research area by exploring origins of cultural, philosophical, social, and educational characteristics which have influenced rhetorical styles of written texts in many different languages and cultures. In working toward an extensive support for the development of a contrastive rhetoric theory, this thesis explores culturally-embedded worldviews, ways of thinking and logic, major concepts and precepts in Confucianism for Chinese culture and classical Greek thought and rhetoric for English culture, and explained how those various characteristics have influenced the rhetorical styles of written texts for the respective and very different cultures. To test statistically the above rhetorical differences between Chinese and English cultures, a corpus is collected, among which fifty English argumentative essays written by Chinese natives are taken from China Daily, and the other fifty argumentative essays written by English natives are taken from The New York Times, USA Today, The Times and The Wall Street Journal. These essays are grouped according to the similarity of their topics. Besides, two argumentative texts representing different rhetorical patterns between English and Chinese natives are carefully selected from The Wall Street Journal and China Daily for special analysis. They are analyzed and compared in these two aspects: 1. Whole-text organizational patterns; 2. Frequency of topic changes between the body paragraphs. The results of this study show that there are some significant differences in those aspects between Chinese and English native...