A Study on the Discourse Connectives in Analects of the Sixth Chan Patriarch Huineng

摘要

By labeling the structure of Analects of the Sixth Chan Patriarch Huineng, this paper is devoted to study of the explicit and implicit connectives, their semantics and usage. We examine the following results: 1) Implicit connectives (2067,84.9%) are more than explicit connectives (369,15.1%). Among 17 discourse relations, only in 2 Hypothesis and Concession explicit connectives are used more than implicit. 2) There are different ways to use synonymous connectives to represent the same relation. On the one hand, the connectives are used most frequently in Continuity - 14 times. On the other hand, Summary-elaboration and Background relations can be set up without any connectives. 3) Among 60 kinds of connectives, the monosemous connectives are more than the polysemous. Polysemous connectives ("ruo( 若 ), ji(即), yi(亦")) contain at most 4 meanings which are used in different ways in sentences. Besides, we analyze the usage of synonymous connectives in Hypothesis and the polysemous connective ("ji(即)") for case studies.