A Comparative Study Of The Rhetorical Relations In English And Chinese Editorials-Based On Rhetorical Structure Theory

Coherence is an important criterion for determining whether a discourse is of high quality or not. Based on rhetorical structure theory (RST for short), which was put forward by William Mann and Sandra Thompson, this thesis analyzes the rhetorical relations of each editorial text chosen from The New York Times and The People's Daily, and tries to find out if any similarities and differences exist between the editorials with regard to coherence. If any, this thesis will furthermore explain what factors influence the coherence construction. Due to the limited time and space, the author draws altogether twelve editorial texts from The New York Times and The People's Daily. After analyzing their rhetorical relations and drawing the tree-like RST diagrams, the author finds that similarity and difference of rhetorical relation use do exist in English and Chinese editorials. The similarity is that they both use Elaboration, List and Justify frequently, and the difference is that English editorials use more Antithesis, Concession, and Contrast than Chinese ones, while Chinese editorials use more Evaluation, Restatement and Multinuclear Restatement than English ones. It is assumed that the similarity and difference can be explained from three perspectives, i.e. linguistic perspective, genre perspective, social and cultural perspective. This is only a tentative conclusion, yet it is inspiring for future studies.