A Contrastive Study On The Chinese And Western University Introductions In English: From The Perspective Of The Rhetorical Structure Theory

With the rapid advancement of globalization, the university introduction inEnglish plays a key role in establishing the university image, propagandizing theuniversity orientation, etc. Hence, it is important to analyze the discourse structure ofthe special kind of promotional text, which has positive practical significance for ouruniversities to blend in with the international community.As a popular theory of discourse analysis and text processing in the past20years,the Rhetorical Structure Theory aims to analyze rhetorical relations hierarchically,revealing the text structure models of all kinds of discourses. On such a basis, thethesis uses the RST to try to reveal the text structure of university introductions inEnglish from different cultural environments, especially from China and two Englishspeaking countries, America and Britain.Through the annotation and contrastive study of rhetorical relations of theselected texts, this thesis tries to solve three research questions, in order to present thedifferences of rhetorical structure diagrams in these Chinese and Western universityintroductions in English. The study finds that: First, the distribution of rhetoricalrelations is not all the same between the Chinese university introductions in Englishand the American and British university introductions, which can be seen from thelisted data and relation diagrams. Second, Elaboration, Joint and Justify relationappear frequently in the university introductions in China, and in America and Britain.Moreover, the former lays stress on Background and Purpose relation, while the latterprefers Evidence and Environment relation. Finally, this thesis analyzes theunderlying causes for similarities and differences of rhetorical relations in the Chineseand Western university introductions in English from genre factors and socio-culturalfactors.The result of this study is of considerable significance. First of all, the textcollected in this study supplements the types of discourse analysis from theperspective of the RST, and the major findings have much enlightenment for thedomestic related research. Secondly, by annotating the Chinese, American and Britishuniversity introductions in English on the basis of the RST, this thesis describes,compares and analyzes the rhetorical structure diagrams of these introductions,indicating the difference of the rhetorical relations between the universityintroductions in English in China and the university introductions in these two English speaking countries. This study is of practical value to the universities in China for thepreparation of their English-version introductions.