English-chinese Rhetoric Of Difference, From A Cultural Perspective

Figures of speech as an indispensable branch in rhetoric have always drawn attention of scholars both at home and abroad. Figures of speech are language forms that are typically regarded as methods to achieve special effects that transcend the literal meaning in specific language context.English and Chinese belong to different language families, because of which great disparity exists in word formation, sentence structure, and word order.This thesis conducts a comparative study between English and Chinese in terms of figures of speech from a cultural perspective, using contrastive rhetoric as its theoretical framework. In the present thesis, figures of comparison, metonymy and euphemism in English and Chinese are compared and contrasted. Differences are found to exist mainly in three areas. In these three figures of speech, different words and phrases are employed for tenors and vehicles, although they are of the same domain. Besides, English and Chinese have their own unique expression patterns. Numerals are used as vehicles in Chinese metonymy, which lacks in English. Also, the development of theory follows different academic tracks. Analysis shows that culture is the one underlying factors of all these differences. The cultural elements like geographical environment, custom, thinking pattern and cognition have strong influences on expression of figures of speech.