Linguistic, cultural, and subcultular issues in contrastive discourse analysis: Anglo-American and Chinese scientific texts  

Oleh:

Taylor, Gordon ; Tingguan, Chen

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Applied Linguistics (Full Text) vol. 12 no. 3 (Sep. 1991), page 319-336.
Fulltext: Vol 12, 3, p 319-336.pdf (1.03MB)

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Perpustakaan PKBB Nomor Panggil: 405/APL/12 Non-tandon: tidak ada Tandon: 1

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Empirical studies designed to test Kaplan's thesis that discourse structure varies widely with 'culturo-linguistic systems' have provoked wildly conflicting results. This lack of agreement is due in large measure to certain assumptions being made about the relation between a language system and a culture, to the nature of the questions being asked, and to a certain amount of disarray in the methodology of studies mounted to test the claim. To overcome these problems, this paper focuses on the likely sources of variability in discourse structure by comparing the introductions to papers written in variety of related disciplines by three groups of physical scientists: Anglo-Americans writing in English, Chinese writing in English, and Chinese writing in Chinese. We find that there is, indeed, an underlying rhetorical structure common to all language groups and disciplines, but that there are systematic variations from this structure. Some variations characterize the discipline rather than the language or nationality of the writers. Others show strong differences between western and Chinese scientists, irrespective of language. The nature of these variations indicates the futility of broad generalizations about the connections between discourse structure and 'culturo-linguistic systems', a finding that courses in English for academic purposes should heed.

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