'Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Cadiz'
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