英文摘要 |
This paper presents a thorough scientific analysis of ”Pixue” (”The Science of Comparison”, 1633), a rhetorical work written by the Italian Jesuit Alfonso Vagnoni 高一志 (c. 1568-1640), according to a neo-rhetorical treatise, ”A General Rhetoric” (1981) by Group μ. In the introduction to his late-Ming text ”Pixue”, Vagnoni illustrates ten kinds of comparison in the form of religious aphorisms. As Group μ concisely notes in ”Poetics and Rhetoric,” the introduction to ”A General Rhetoric”, that ancient rhetoricians have a ”mania for naming” and these endless nomenclatures have been the evident sign for rhetoric's decline. Rhetoric, in Group μ's sense, merits being called a science and falls within the cope of structuralism and semiotics. For this reason they rethink rhetoric in structural terms and formulate a new classification of metaboles: metaplasms, metataxes, metasememes, and metalogisms. By means of structural analyses, this paper deals with the nucleus of a rhetorical comparison, that is, how and why the ”adduced term” (the visible) can be used to clarify the ”solicited term” (the invisible). In the structural linguistic sense, this rhetorical question relates to the alternation of expressions and contents of lexemes, and consequently it must also be taken as a semiotic question. |