Bridging The Paradigm Gap: World Englishes And Contrastive Rhetoric

This dissertation makes an attempt to fill the paradigm gap existing between two separated fields of inquiry, the study of World Englishes (WEs) and contrastive rhetoric (CR). Specifically, I argue the study of world Englishes has not come to be recognized as a legitimate field of inquiry and attempt to see what the forty years' practice of CR work is able to offer to WEs researchers.CR was initiated in the 1960s as an attempt to improve beginning-level ESL students' writing. It was as such pedagogica; and combined the then popular approaches of contrastive analysis and error analysis. The 1980s saw two developments in the field: comparison of rhetorical and discoursal differences between languages and differences between English writings produced by students and professionals from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The organized effort to study varieties of English started in the mid-1980s, and it has been one of the 'major movements,' which influence the development of contrastive rhetoric (Connor, 1996/2001, p. 12).The first two chapters, Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, are occupied with basic terms, historical developments and contemporary states of the two disciplines as well as the major approaches used in and the main issues involved in them. These two chapters are intended to be a foundation for later discussion.Chapter 3 concerns itself with the scientific status of WEs as a recognized academic discipline. Kuhn (1962)'s concept of paradigm and P. K. Matsuda's (2003a) model of internal metadisciplinary inquiry are used for this purpose. I argue that WEs, as it is currently practiced, is still in a pre-paradigmatic period in the Khunian sense. Matsuda's model is used to evaluate the study subjects, the methodologies, the development, and the future directions of the discipline.Chapter 4 suggests a shift of focus from the present sentence grammar todiscourse, linguistic units beyond the sentence level. I argue that only when discoursal features are taken into consideration can we really see the nature of world Englishes or that of a specific variety of English. Language tends to be words or combinations of words at the sentence level, but beyond the sentence socio-cultural factors and ways of thinking come into play. A variety of English is much more than a group of culture-specific loan words and deviations in pronunciation. A case study will be conducted to see in what sense 'English is/as a Chinese language' makes sense if English now belongs to whoever uses it.In Chapter 5, the traditional tripartite typology of world Englishes, including Kachruvian three-concentric-circle model, is proven to be inadequate and ineffective in describing the complex situation of world Englishes. Instead, I suggest, from a linguistic point of view, a division between LI and L2 varieties of English in order to resume the centrality of linguistic analysis of world Englishes. This chapter is ended with a case study, which questions the now popular statement 'English is an Asian language.'Chapter 6 examines the study of world Englishes methodologically. Of course, different perspectives are needed for a better understanding of the nature of the presence of English as an international language, but I have argued that, from a linguistic point of view, quantitative factors must be integrated into various tasks of describing English varieties. A case study of academic journal abstracts composed by native Chinese writers, again, is conducted to further confirm my stand of China/Chinese English.The last chapter is the conclusion, which consists of a short summary of my research in the dissertation, limitations of the present work, and my suggestions for further research.