Contrastive Rhetoric

by Jonathan Semenick

Rhetoric is a mode of thinking. It has to do with what goes on in a speaker's mind rather than what comes out of a speaker's mouth. Each language offers speakers an interpretation of the world, which may be different from that of (speakers of) other languages. The pattern of thought in the English language (as in many other Indo-European languages) originated in ancient Greece and was shaped by Roman, Medieval European, and later Western thinkers. English presents the impressions made on our senses predominantly as human activities brought about by human will. English speakers say, for example, "I see her." The more fatalistic Eskimos in Greenland would say "She appears to me." People from different cultures are likely to have very different views on such varied topics as time, physical contact, conventions of reading (right-to-left versus left-to-right, etc.), gender, culture, alphabets, and whether tones make a difference in the meaning of the words one says. Another example is the length of "orientation statements" in writing. Several studies have shown that English speakers typically produce much shorter orientation to the theme of a sentence or discussion than non-native English writers. Broad use of contrastive rhetoric as a classroom consciousness-raising tool can point to linguistic variety and rhetorical choices available to different students. The following illustration graphically represents typical paragraph structures by speakers of several languages: extensive parallel constructions in the Semitic group, an "indirect" approach to the topic in the Oriental group, and frequent digressions in Romance and Slavic groups. This illustration was first introduced by R. B. Kaplan. Although it is now often criticized for being too simplistic and for assuming the English rhetorical model to be "straight" or "normal," Kaplan's theory is still extremely valuable because it points out the nature of those rhetorical differences which, although obvious to English native speakers, are often "felt" rather than understood.

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