Towards A Rhetoric-appraisal Approach To Academic Abstract Studies

The present study attempts to combine Kenneth Burke’s New Rhetoric withAppraisal Theory, so as to form a new framework, which the author terms“Rhetoric-Appraisal Approach”, for analyzing academic abstracts. The new frameworkis intended to be one that can both analyze the surface structure and dig into therhetorical motives and rhetorical process behind it, thus complementing previous studiesand digging deeper into abstract. The paper has four achievements:1) it not onlyprovides empirical evidence for Kenneth Burke’s New Rhetoric, but also offers (byincorporating Burke’s ideas with the Appraisal Theory) a new direction for applyingBurke’s ideas;2) it constructs a new theoretical framework for discourse analysis whichcan be used to analyze both surface structures and rhetorical motives underneath;3) itvalidates the effectiveness of the new framework by analyzing16Chinese abstracts and16English abstracts respectively;4) the analysis provides explorative inquiry intorhetorical motives hidden within academic abstracts paving the way for future studies onabstracts. The study found that:Distribution of the three categories of Rhetoric-Appraisal resources varies greatly.Authors of the abstracts do not use any Sympathy-Affect resources, but prefer to useInaccuracy-Appreciation resources. In Identification through Inaccuracy-Appreciation,identification is achieved by having a common pursuit of the beautiful. By seducingaudience to project themselves on things of higher perfection, the audiences’ attitudes orco-operations are often induced without awareness. In Identification throughInaccuracy-Deixis, non-person deixis that appears more objective than person deixis aremore often used by abstract authors.