A Quantitative Analysis Study of Rhetorical Strategies in English Speeches Based on an Internet Corpus

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the rhetorical strategies of Chinese speakers differ from those of British and American speakers in English speeches. Different rhetorical strategies have an important impact on the fluency and rigor of English speeches and affect the audience experience, so this paper analyzes the differences in rhetorical strategies between Chinese and British and American speakers’ speech texts in a quantitative way based on the theory of rhetorical structure and using an online speech corpus. We found that rhetorical strategies such as comment, motivation, control, conclusion, evaluation, answer, involuntary cause, topic shift, involuntary effect, and parallel strategy were used significantly more frequently in Chinese speakers’ English speeches than in native speakers (p<0.05). Chinese speakers used more causal connectives but lacked variety, showing a non-linear and undirected “Eastern rhetorical strategy”, which differed from the linear “Western rhetorical strategy”.