A Contrastive Rhetoric Study On Discourse Pattern Between English And Chinese Based On Blog Corpus

A host of scholars have been dedicated to exploring discourse features of English and Chinese texts and trying to find out the differences. Kaplan's classical study of "Cultural Thought Patterns in Inter-Cultural Education " has opened up a new route of contrastive rhetoric study, although his hypothesis that English discourse pattern features linearity while Oriental discourse pattern features circularity is disputable.Many researchers have followed the predecessor's footprints to further examine the differences in discourse pattern between English and Chinese texts and redefine the comparison facets and approach the comparison from distinct perspectives of narrative, argumentative, expository, and so on. This study is supplementarily designated to conduct the comparative analysis based on blog corpus under the framework of Rhetorical Structural Theory. The following research questions are addressed by the author in order to fulfill the research purpose.(1) Are there any significant differences of discourse pattern between Chinese and English blogs?(2) Does Kaplan's hypothesis (circularity vs. linearity) hold true in blog texts?As for the research question one, in order to examine whether there aresignificant differences of discourse pattern between Chinese and English, we have to decompose the discourse pattern into concrete and calculatable criteria as follows: (1) the general appearance frequencies of rhetorical relations in the samples; and (2) the top structure of each text, mainly its rhetorical relations. As for the research question two, so as to testify Kaplan's hypothesis, we have to examine the overall structures of the sample texts, such as the location of the topic sentence of the whole text and overall framework of the text. Thus we are to explore the research question two in the following two aspects: (1) the distribution of the root node of each text; (2) the general construct of RST tree; and (3) the deep structure of RST tree.We have initially collected altogether 140 blogs concerning financial crisis from the website of "Google blog search", among which English and Chinese articles are equally distributed. To ensure the validity of this research, we cross out the disqualified blogs on the basis of length, central topic and article resource. After screening the selected samples, we have reserved 30 articles of English and Chinese blogs respectively. Three colleagues have been invited to annotate the corpus making use of the RST Tool software, including an English major (the author herself) who is responsible for annotating the English blog samples, a Chinese major who is responsible for annotating the Chinese blog samples and an Economics major who is responsible for checking the annotation results finished by the English and Chinese majors. To ensure the intra-consistency of identifying the rhetorical relations among annotators, we have conducted a pilot annotation.Having built up the RST Treebank, we begin to approach the research questions by exploring the statistical features of the five aforementioned variables: general frequency of rhetorical relations, top relation, distribution of root node, general construct and deep structure of RST tree. On the basis of the data obtained, we try to explain the underlying causes in every possible way such as cultural influence, genric features of sample texts and the writer of blog.To conclude, this study has found that differences of discourse pattern between English and Chinese blogs do exist in certain aspects. But it is noteworthy that these differences carry no statistical significance. It does not mean that we are expected to pay no heed to the rhetorical difference between English and Chinese writing. However, the insignificance of difference in discourse structure as indicated in this study may pose as a sign of rhetoric trend since globalization has been permeating all walks of life. It reminds us researchers to adopt a developmental view while conducting contrastive rhetoric studies since the rhetorical structure of writing does not stay hard and fast over time. We are supposed to keep up with the times and update our theoretical framework in due time.