A Comparative Study On Rhetorical Relations And Rhetorical Structures Of English M.A. Thesis Abstracts By Chinese And American Students

Rhetorical Structure Theory was first put forward by Mann and Thompson in 1987.According to this theory,texts are arranged by functional spans.In a coherent text,smaller spans form larger parts in certain relations and the process goes on until the discourse forms.This theory has been applied to studies on discourses with different lengths and styles,such as news,advertisement,cover letters,acknowledgments,political speech and so on.However,English abstract,as a kind of academic discourse,has been rarely studied under this theoretical perspective.This paper is a tentative attempt to study abstracts from the Rhetorical Structure Theory perspective.The author chooses 40 M.A.English thesis abstracts by American students and another 40 by Chinese students as two parallel corpora to analyze the rhetorical relations and rhetorical structures of these texts.This paper aims to answer three questions:(1)What are the similarities and differences in the number and kinds of rhetorical relations between the abstracts written by Chinese and American writers?(2)What are the common rhetorical structures in the abstracts by both groups pf students and how do abstracts by American and Chinese students differ from each other in the use of rhetorical structures?(3)What are the possible reasons for the similarities and differences in the rhetorical relations and rhetorical structures in abstracts written by theses two groups of students? To answer these three questions,both quantitative and qualitative methods are used in the analysis.Qualitatively,the rhetorical relations and rhetorical structures of discourses were analyzed in details.Quantitatively,SPSS 19 and RST(version 3.45)are used in statistical analysis.In consistency with the three questions,there are three findings of this study.(1)In terms of similarities,Elaboration,Background,List,Conjunction,and Preparation are the five most frequently used rhetorical relations while motivation and concession are the two least frequently used relations in the abstracts by both groups;as for the differences,there are more use of Antithesis,Evidence,Circumstance,Condition,Interpretation,Purpose,Result and Means in abstracts by American students,whereas there are more use of Elaboration in abstracts by Chinese students.(2)The common rhetorical structures used by both groups are the Elaboration structure,the Background-other structure and the Elaboration-List structure;the differences in rhetorical structure between abstracts by American and Chinese students lie in that Chinese students prefer to use the Background-other structure while American writers like to use the Elaboration structure.(3)The underlying reasons for the similarities and differences in the use of rhetorical relations and rhetorical structures can be attributed to genre and thinking patterns.This study contributes to the application of rhetorical structure theory,and provides pedagogical implications for writing instructions in English for academic purpose.Besides,the limitation of this study includes two aspects: the number of samples analyzed in this corpus is not big enough;the subjectivity in the text segmentation and relation identification during the analytical process.