A Contrastive Study On Rhetorical Relations Between English And Chinese Environment News Discourse

The whole analysis is conducted in the framework of RST with the help of RSTTool345. Rhetorical Structure treebanks of English and Chinese environment news are set. Through the analysis of similarities and differences between English and Chinese environment news, the thesis intends to explore the reasons for them. The following three research questions will be answered:1) What are the differences and similarities between the environment news in English and Chinese from the perspective of Rhetorical Structure Theory?2) Whether these rhetorical relations in the discourses are scattered mixedly or there exists some preferred ones?3) What are the most commonly used rhetorical relations and what are the reasons for the differences or similarities in English and Chinese discourses?This study deals with the contrastive analysis of English and Chinese environment news selected from several major newspapers in China, America and Britain. Source of raw data are twenty pieces of news selected from leading newspapers in English and Chinese, such as The Washington Post, Guardian, The New York Times, The Independent, The Globalist, USA Today and news extracted from Reuters. Chinese news is selected from Xinhua Agency and People's Daily. By the environment news mentioned here, the author means the comments and results of the most influential environment events or environment conference happened in 2009-2011. In order to keep the research valid, the author chooses twenty pieces of environment news reports share many similarities in theme, time and size.Through the analysis, the author finds that the preferences of Rhetorical Relations in the English and Chinese environment news are different from each other. None of any piece of news contains every RST relation and none of any relation occurs in all of these samples. In the ten English environment news, these rhetorical relations Elaboration--18.75%, non-volitional result--13.19%, joint--11.11%, background--9.72% and evidence--8.33% are top five. In ten Chinese environment news, the five most frequently used rhetorical relations comprises interpretation—31.87%, list—19.78%, Elaboration—14.29%, background—14.29%, and concession& justify—3.85%.All in all, both differences and similarities exist in selected English and Chinese environment news. With the globaliztion all over the world, languages are developing. The differences between English and Chinese discourses'patterns may be narrowing. Thus, the researchers should adopt a developing view for Contrstive Rhetoric researches.