An analysis of argumentative texts for contrastive rhetoric

Abstract

Contrastive Rhetoric has been an outstanding line of research of Writing across Cultures in the United States for over thirty years. Despite the criticism it has received, it is enjoying a revival favoured by a new approach to writing, text analysis and culture itself. In this paper a model of analysis for argumentative texts in Spanish and English is introduced in accordance with recent tendencies in Contrastive Rhetoric. Apart from a traditional quantitative text analysis, we propose an analysis of discourse markers and Rhetorical Structure Theory. These linguistic data are correlated with an evaluation of the texts to study the possible relationship between culture, writing style and evaluation. As a consequence of the results obtained, possible research follow-ups will be exposed for argumentative and other text types.