Characteristics of Different Text Types in Lun Yu(the Analects)

Lun Yu(the Analects)has been regarded as a collection of what Confucius and some of his disciples said. From the literature to date, we can see that relevant studies on the text types and their characteristics are few. Working within the Systemic Functional Linguistics framework, this paper attempts to group the text types in Lun Yu into three categories:Quotations, Dialogues and Descriptions, with a few sections belonging to Narratives. Studies of the characteristics concerning different text types can be helpful not only in the contrastive studies of the English and Chinese versions of Lun Yu but also in the evaluation of its translated texts.