英语论文网

 of  texts  with the purpose to calculate the major rhetorical relations. Then the underlying causes for the  similarities  and  differences  of  the  major  rhetorical  relations  presented  in  the  two types of texts will also be explored.  The most fundamental and important part for rhetorical structure analysis is the identification of the rhetorical relations between segments, which begins with primary work  of  units  division.  Units  are  the  minimal  elements  of  the  analysis  whose  size  is arbitrary, however the independent functional integrity of the units should be ensured in  the  division  of  the  text  into  units  (Mann  and  Thompson,  1987:  6).  Mann  and Thompson  (1987)  take  clause  as  the  basic  unit.  In  the  analysis  of  English  texts,  a clause containing a finite verb is taken as the basic unit or segment of the cover letters, and  the  clause-units  include  independent  clauses  (sentences)  as  well  as  dependent adverbial clauses. And Chinese texts define the elementary discourse unit as sentence, which is separated by period, question mark, exclamation point. In the analysis of the present study, identification of rhetorical relations between the  text  segments  involves  both  top-down  and  bottom-up  analysis  simultaneously until  all  segments  of  the  sample  cover  letters  are  linked  up  together  in  a  tree-like structure.     

..........

Conclusion

The  present  study  tries  to  make  a  contrastive  study  on  the  cover  letters  in Chinese  and  English  from  the  perspective  of  Rhetorical  Structure  Theory.  Under  the theoretical  framework  of  RST,  ten  cover  letters  in  English  and  ten  cover  letters  in Chinese have been analyzed through a qualitative research method. From the analysis and statistics, the major findings are listed as follows: First, from the analysis of the sample texts and statistics of the frequency of the rhetorical relations, it is found that not all the rhetorical relations are employed in the cover letters. There are 13 rhetorical relations employed in the cover letters in English: Elaboration,  Purpose,  Evidence,  Justify,  Motivation,  Condition,  List,  Background, Means,  Volitional  Result,  Concession,  Enablement  and  Summary.  There  are  19 rhetorical relations employed in the cover letters in Chinese. Compared with those in the  English  cover  letters,  the  other  9  rhetorical  relation  including  Anthesis, Preparation,  Restatement,  Evaluation,  Volitional  cause,  Contrast,  Joint,  Multinuclear Restatement and sequence are employed in the Chinese ones, and 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。