| This study intended to develop a theoretical support for modern contrastive rhetoric which used to be recognized as ‘notion.’ The study examined current perspectives of contrastive rhetoric which has been established around the Sapir-Whofian hypothesis and applied linguistics. Noting that the negligence of formal rhetorical aspects in the definition of contrastive rhetoric has resulted in a field being grounded on ‘notion,’ this dissertation asserts that contrastive rhetoric should be developed as a theory. Comparing rhetorical aspects of Confucianism in East Asia with Aristotelian rhetoric in the United States, this work suggests that current contrastive rhetoric should expand its research area by exploring origins of cultural, philosophical, social, and educational characteristics which have influenced rhetorical styles of written texts in many different languages and cultures. In working toward an extensive support for the development of a contrastive rhetoric theory, this dissertation explored culturally-embedded world views, ways of thinking and logic, major concepts and precepts in Confucianism for East Asian culture and classical Greek thought and rhetoric for the North American culture, and explained how those various characteristics have influenced the rhetorical styles of written texts for the respective and very different cultures. To test statistically the above rhetorical differences between the two cultures, a corpus of fifty expository essays written by Korean students in Korean, a representative of East Asian languages and cultures, and of another fifty essays written by native English speaker students in English were collected and examined. Based on the findings of this quantitative research, brief pedagogical implications are suggested. |
