The Research Of Chinese Character Iconicity From The Ｖiew Of Semiology

Chinese character is the recording medium l of Chinese language, it is the record of sound and at the same time, it is also the record of meaning, it can express the meaning directly. Chinese character enbodied obvious iconicity at the symbol level that is the Chinese characters remarkable difference from alphabetic writing.The iconicity of Chinese character is different from the motivation in terms of Chinese traditional philology but they are two relevant concepts. This paper is from the view of western theory of semiology to research Chinese character.The iconicity of Chinese character is embodied in form of image firstly, but this image is not to imitate the objective things directly. Chinese character "image" is the result of interaction between subjective and objective factors which embodied the people's cognitive factors.The perspective of this article is to research the way of deriving images and the angle of adopting images of Chinese characters."Image" is the soul of Chinese characters and the development foundation of the symbols system. In the process of Chinese character development ,it always kept the tradition of image expression and always remained the way of image thinking. With limited images,Chinese character constructed a complex symbol system and metaphor playing an important role in the constructing process.Chinese character is iconic symbol, this article just only make a preliminary studies on Chinese character iconicity and more further research is needed in the future.