A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese News Comments On The Basis Of Rhetorical Structure Theory

Contrastive Rhetoric compares the rhetorical features of two languages and discusses the similarities and differences between the two. The typical representative of CR “Kaplan’s Model” manifests that in comparing Chinese and English writings, English is linear while Chinese rhetorical pattern is spiral. However, CR is criticized due to its lack of a systematic theoretical framework and methodology.Rhetorical Structure Theory arises with the criticism of CR and it is considered as not only a theory but also a methodology. The RST diagram builds structures on the writings and it is a new perspective of CR to construct the rhetorical relations between clauses. RST breaks Kaplan’s binary analysis of Chinese and English: English rhetorical pattern is linear while Chinese is spiral, and utilizes a more scientific and systematic way to explore the issues in Contrastive Rhetoric.This thesis mainly studies the rhetorical relations of Chinese and English news comments by comparing the RST diagrams of these two languages and analyzing the results of the statistics. In this paper, twelve news comments are selected for study, which come from famous and mainstream media both in China and foreign countries. This study is a case study, which means there may exist the limitations of restricted numbers and subjects.From the view of CR, this thesis finds out that from the whole distribution of rhetorical relations in RST diagrams of Chinese and English texts, both are almost similar but there are a few differences. For example, the joint relation differs a lot in these two languages of writings. In Chinese writings, more joint relations exist than that in English. As for the top structure, Chinese and English writings are different.