Genre across Languages and Cultures- Newspaper Commentaries in China and Australia

Traditional contrastive rhetoric research is often restricted to the textuallevel of analysis. By providing both a textual and contextual viewof genre across languages and cultures, this book presents a frameworkfor contrastive rhetoric research which moves beyond the textinto the context of production and interpretation of the text. The bookexamines the textual patterning of Australian and Chinese commentariesand interpersonal and intertextual features of the texts, as wellas considers possible contextual factors which might contribute to theformation of the newspaper commentaries in the two differentlanguages and cultures. This analysis contributes towards answeringthe questions: How do writers in different languages and culturesposition themselves in relation to the topics that they write about?How do they manipulate the topic and address their readers by the useof various linguistic strategies and devices? How do the roles of thepress and opinion discourses mediate and influence constructions ofthe Chinese and English commentaries? How do discourses of terrorismin these two settings relate to textual and intertextual practices? Thebook is addressed to researchers in contrastive rhetoric and discourseresearch. It is also directed towards scholars in intercultural communicationand translation.