| More and more book writers rely on the book prefaces as an effective marketing strategy. To date, very few scholars have explored the characteristics of this genre and its role in the establishment of an interpersonal relationship between the writer and the potential readers. This article makes a contrastive study on rhetorical characteristics between Chinese and English book prefaces in economic books. To explore this issue, the article adopts a perspective that shows how macro as well as micro textual choices interact in contributing to the achievement of the communicative purpose(s) of a genre. At the macro-textual level the analysis focuses on rhetorical structure, mainly drawing on the notion of move. The results show that there are no intrinsic differences between Chinese and English prefaces with regard to the move structure. It proves that the shared communicative purpose is the core, which shapes the genre and gives it a schematic structure. Meanwhile, with the increasing need of promotion, both texts share many characteristics of the promotional genres. However, some degree of divergence has been found, mainly in the frequency of occurrence of Gap move and Acknowledges move. We may speculate these differences on the basis of the influence of social and cultural factors. A further analysis on the modal verbs, hedges and pronouns at the micro level reveals that both the Chinese and English writers use the similar interpersonal rhetorical strategies to establish a desirable relationship with the readers. However, the English writers are better in pulling the readers closer while the Chinese writers are likely to distance themselves from the readers. |
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