Rhetorical Patterns Of Argumentative Texts In English Newspapers

The research presented in this thesis offers a contrastive rhetoric study of rhetorical similarities and differences between argumentative texts from China Daily and The New York Times so as to enrich the genre-based contrastive rhetoric study on English writings under different cultural backgrounds. Addressing text linguistic analytic frameworks of thematic progression and theory of cohesion, the rhetorical similarities and differences of the two sets of texts are explored with respect to three research questions of thematic progression, semantic cohesion and paragraph developing models. The findings show that Chinese English texts and native English texts have categorical differences in thematic progression and semantic cohesive devices, but no categorical differences in paragraph developing models.In addition to an introduction and a conclusion, this thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter One makes an introduction to definitions of related terms and concepts, synthesizes and evaluates contrastive rhetoric and text linguistic theories as well as the most influential researches in Chinese-English contrastive rhetoric. Chapter Two describes the research design including data collection and data process and reports the findings. Chapter Three discusses the results and suggests implications for related fields of study.This study, which can be taken as the first step of an extensive research to explore similarities and differences between Chinese English texts and native English texts and the different writing conventions...