A Cognitive Account Of Morphological Aspects And Production Of Meaning On Chinese Pictophonetic Characters

There are two main stages in the process of the development of Chinese characters. The first stage is dominated by pictograms(象形字),while the second stage is dominated by pictophonetic characters(形声字,PCs for short). Pictograms are the base of Chinese characters in that all other characters are founded on them.Xu Shen, a scholar of Han dynasty, subsumes Chinese characters into six categories. They are pictograms, ideogram(指事字),semantic-semantic compound(会意字),transformed cognate(转注),phonetic loan character(假借)and pictophonetic character. Among them, pictograms are the rudiment characters because the formation and creation of all other five characters involves the participation of pictograms. Besides, PCs are the well-developed and mature characters not only because PCs outnumber other characters but also because the formation of PCs involves almost all the mechanisms through which the other five types of characters take shape. In addition, the advent of PCs embodies some sort of the feature of alphabetic writing system. So if the mechanisms through which PCs come into being are clarified, the mechanisms of the formation of Chinese characters are uncovered.As far as the pictograms are concerned, Xu Shen proposes his discovery on this issue. He finds that pictograms can be roughly divided into two groups:the pictograms representing human body or parts of human body and the pictograms representing things of reality. More precisely, Pictograms are created by miming the form of human body or parts of human body per se and by imitating the contours of objects distant.Lexicologists and etymologists have held the hypothesis above till now but regrettably made no further study from a point view of philosophy.This thesis suggests that the things represented by pictograms are things which are indispensible of the survival of human beings. According to Heidegger (Yang,2006) Dasein (Being-in-the-world) is the way that human beings survive. Human beings have to interact with the things and his environment to survive. And things in reality exhibit themselves only through these interactions. Things in this sense are not only material in nature; more importantly, things are nodes of relations (Zhang,2008). One pole of this relation is the things or entities of reality; the other pole is the survival of human. Things are thing-for-us, not thing-itself. So the selection of things represented by pictograms is anthropocentric.As far as the pictograms representing human body or parts of human body are concerned, statistics shows that pictograms of this group, used as components of PCs, enjoy high usage frequency. This study suggests that human beings have to interact with the world around them to survive, and in these processes they have to resort to their body and parts of their body. Human beings acquire their experience through such interactions with the world by their body. To record such interaction, Chinese characters adopt metonymically the body or body parts (represented by some pictograms) as components of characters representing such actions and events, which cannot be directly mimed or depicted in graphs. In this sense, the adoption of body or body-parts pictograms as a component or a radical of a graph which representing some action and performed by this body-part embodies the principles of Embodiment and Embodied-experience (Ungerer & Schimid,2001).In addition, the specific method to create a pictogram is to mime the contour of the thing depicted. In this sense, pictograms are diagrammatic icon in nature. Generally speaking, the formation of Chinese characters is based on these "things" and "body" or parts of body represented by pictograms with the metaphorical and metonymical extension of these two entities above. Besides, Chinese characters come into being under the mechanism of concept integration.Pictophonetic characters are composed of two parts:a vision/image-form and a phonetic/sound-form. Studies suggest that in many cases a sound-forms of a PC is its semantic root in that this sound-form are former independent word and contains the main meaning while an image-form is attached to the sound-form to mark a prominent aspect of its main meaning. This study subsumes PCs into two groups:the endocentric PCs and exocentric PCs and the generation of these two groups are scrutinized in detail. In this process the author finds that conceptual metonymy and concept integration are the main mechanisms at work through which the meaning of a PC yields.To sum up, this thesis focuses on the formation of PCs and the generation of their meaning and tries to give a tentative account from point of view of cognitive linguistics.