A Contrastive Analysis Of Attitude Resources In Chinese And American University Students’ English Speeches:From The Perspective Of New Rhetoric

Many national competitions of English public speaking have found quite a lot of excellent English speakers,such as the national English public speaking competition held by FLTRP(Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press)in China,and the one held by American University Students English Speech Association.As English speeches that have been awarded for their excellency,what similarities and differences are there in their speeches caught my curiosity.The corpora in this thesis consist of 40 English public speeches given by prize-owners.A comparative analysis is made to see the similarities and differences on the distribution and frequency of attitude resources in the two databases.It is deemed that different attitude resources are endowed with different rhetorical communicative meanings.How the American and Chinese university students use different attitude resources to achieve a certain rhetorical communicative technique,and how the technique is transferred in the form of persuasion is the core concern in this thesis.This thesis will involve the following research questions: 1)What differences and similarities are there between the Chinese and American university students’ English speeches? 2)What can we indicate from the differences and similarities as regards to English public speaking teaching and delivering?Quantitative and qualitative methods are implemented to make the comparative analysis.It is found that in spite of the fact that both American and Chinese university students employ many attitude resources in their speeches,American university students tend to use much more than Chinese university students do.And it’s always the case that positive attitude resources are dominant in both American and Chinese university students’ English speeches.For all of the three attitude resources in American and Chinese university students’ English speeches,affect resources occupy the most,and the second goes to judgement resources,and the last one is appreciation resources.The difference value between affect resources and judgement resources,and the difference value between judgement resources and appreciation resources are not so big in American university students’ speeches,which is around 10%.On the other hand,the difference value of the resources in Chinese university students’ speeches is almost 20%.Moreover,among all the 12 sub-categories,the employment also has something in common and different.For affect resources,American university students employ inclination resources most,while Chinese university students prefer happiness resources more;for judgement resources,American university students have a preference for propriety resources,while Chinese university students are inclined to use capacity resources;for appreciation resources,what American and Chinese university students use most are the same,i.e.reaction resources.However,it is worth noting that in American university students’ English speeches,the difference value between the positive and negative resources is not very big and a kind of balance exists.Besides,it is also noticed that different attitude resources are preferred due to different communicative techniques in rhetoric.It is implicated that in English public speaking teaching and training,trainers and teachers can pay more attention to the interconnection between attitude resources and communicative goals in new rhetoric,so that persuasion can be better achieved.