The Genre Analysis Of The Analects Of Confucius From The Systemic Functional Perspective

With the development of discourse analysis and textual linguistics over the past years, many linguists have begun to shift their attention to the genre analysis. Genre analysis has evolved from the surface-level description of language to the deep-level explanation and has concerned mostly with the macro-structure and communicative function of the text.The Analects of Confucius is a bright pearl in the Chinese cultural heritage; however, most of the studies on its textual analysis just touch the surface of its genre. As one of the earliest analects in Chinese history, it deserves our attempt to analyze its genre in a systemic functional perspective.This Master thesis is aimed at investigating how the genre of Ana enters the Analects of Confucius through the schematic structures and how genre as a context of culture is realized in the given context. The study is carried out within a systemic functional approach.The thesis can be divided into six chapters. Chapter One is the introduction to the background, the data and methodology of this study. And the aims and objectives of the research and the structure of the thesis are also presented.Chapter Two starts with a brief review of various approaches to genre analysis as well as the divergent views among functional grammarians, and ends up with the relevant study of the Analects. Chapter Three further clarifies the general theoretical assumptions underlying this study—Martin's genre theory and Halliday's three Metafunctions, as well as the dynamic approach proposed by Martin and others.Chapter Four and Chapter Five focus on the practical text typology. Chapter Four investigates how genre gets into text through the generic structure potential and the possible micro-registers embedded in the data. Chapter Five discusses how genre is realized at the lexico-grammatical level in the Analects, exploring the different highly favored linguistic options in different micro-registers.The last chapter, Chapter Six, is the conclusion of the whole thesis. The research demonstrates that the genre of the Analects is an Ana, a recorded collection of dialogues (hidden dialogues) with the combination of a number of narrative and descriptive texts. These variations of subgenres reveal different linguistic styles and schematic, structures.These three micro-register texts are all goal-oriented, staged processes with their own unique schematic structure.The thesis also reveals that the micro-registers in the Analects have different highly favored options at the lexico-grammatical level, which is closely linked with the choice of the genre of Ana, and in tuna the realization of genre. Finally the suggestions for further study and application are presented at the end of the thesis.