Contrastive Rhetoric

Connor’s article Intercultural rhetoric research: beyond the texts (2004) shows that the study of contrastive rhetoric has been an object of study during the last decades and that it is still in its formative stages as a discipline. There are several aspects in her article that show some kind of evolution of contrastive rhetoric in contrast to her book from 1996 (Contrastive Rhetoric. Cross-cultural aspects of second language writing).

Although both texts emphasize the idea that contrastive rhetoric is interdisciplinary, the  (sub-) disciplines included in order to describe it vary from text to text. For instance, in the book she talks about several theories or disciplines that should be included when carrying out studies on contrastive rhetoric: theory of applied linguistics, linguistic relativity, rhetoric, text linguistics, discourse types and genres, theory of literacy and theory of translation.  In the article, corpus analysis as a methodological discipline and an ethnographic approach to contrastive rhetoric are added to the previous ones.

The fact that there is so much variation when trying to describe contrastive rhetoric and that there is not an approach to it support the idea that this is a discipline whose theoretical basis are not set yet.  However, as Connor points out, contrastive rhetoric is important not only in order to understand cultural differences among languages that lead to breakdowns in communication or to issues related to unbalanced power relationships in SL writing but also because getting to know more about shared and different aspects in SL writing can help us to achieve general understanding of language communication and language universals (1996: 5-7).  

I have personally experienced moments of chaos before carrying out a contrastive analysis for my Master thesis in translation studies. My idea was to contrast newspaper discourse in Spanish and its translation into English. The first problem I had to deal with was the type of text (or discourse?) I was going to analyze. My corpus consisted of opinion articles. However, the features of this type of text (or or genre?) are not the same in both languages.  Secondly, what was the right or appropriate amount of texts to analyze? Other questions followed: what was I going to analyze? It was just a master thesis so the scope of the analysis should not be too big. I decided I was going to look at reported speech structures. As far as the linguistic structures for reported speech were concerned, for what purposes were they employed in the original texts? Do people use reported speech in Spanish and English for the same pragmatic purposes? What are these purposes? Does the translator follow the author’s intentions or is (s)he positioning in a different way? If yes, what strategies does (s)he use in order to do so? Are they very obvious or do they require further analysis? All these questions were impossible to be answered so I got to the conclusion that I was being too ambitious. I listed all the approaches and/or methodologies that related to my study:

1.       Theories of translation

2.       Corpus linguistics

3.       Discourse analysis

4.       Cognitive linguistics

5.       Ethnography of discourse

6.       Theory of newspaper discourse

7.       Argumentation theory (rhetoric and persuasion)

8.       Pragmatics (Parochial pragmatics).

Having experienced this chaos, I think it is of paramount importance to establish a clear definition of contrastive rhetoric. However, is it possible to include the same disciplines in studies of contrastive rhetoric across cultures or the disciplines include in the description of contrastive rhetoric will vary depending on which languages are the object of the studies? We can only answer this question by carrying out contrastive studies in many different languages. Does this mean that in order to define what contrastive rhetoric is we first have to collect data from many languages instead of following an already existing clear set of procedures?

Another question that can be answered by studies of contrastive rhetoric is that what would happen to a person whose native language is not English and who has to write a master thesis in English but his/her writing skills in his/her native language are not very developed? What type of discursive patterns is that person going to employ in her thesis? Do those patterns belong to his/her native language or not, as (s)he has not the writing skills necessary to do it?