Rhetoric Study Of English Debating Competition From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Parliamentary Debate is a team format modeled on the British House of Parliamentary, of which the proposition side represents the Government; the other side represents the opposition. Debaters conduct a significant motion to make both constructive speech and rebuttal. FLTRP Cup National English Debating Competition adopts British Parliamentary Debating form today. With wide-spread reputation and participation, excellent debaters, standard debating procedure and evaluation criterion, authoritative judgers, this English Debating Competition has been the best-known national English debating event among universities in China till now. An excellent and heated debate should be full of clash of both thoughts and languages.The author of this thesis collected nearly all previous semifinals and finals videos and set up the debate database for research relevance. Combined with previous debate trainings and competitions participation experience, the author devotes to work out the application of main rhetoric figures in English Debating Competitions from the perspective of Relevance Theory.This thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter introduces relevant research at home and abroad, purpose and significance of this thesis, key issues and research method, and the overall structure of this thesis. Chapter two covers three sections. The first section elaborates Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory from the perspective of Relevance and degree of Relevance. The second section introduces figure of speech. The third section explores the relationship between rhetoric and debate. Chapter three gives a systematic explanation of debate, especially the "FLTRP" National English Debating Competition. This thesis probes into the application and characteristics of figures of speech in the English debate competition to evaluate the effect that caused by the application of rhetoric question, question-answer, analogy, hyperbole, parallelism, understatement, quotation, etc. However, the author finds that the most frequently used rhetoric figures concentrate on merely rhetoric question, question and answer sentence, parallelism, and analogy. In Chapter four the author applies Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory to analyze the relevance of different figures of speech in English debate competition and the reason of frequently using them to explain logical and rigorously thinking, and try to figure out why some arguments are convincing and can win applause, so as to appreciate linguistic features of English debating. Chapter five summarizes the whole thesis and put forward limitations and possibility of future research of this field.