Study Of Modern Chinese Characters

The nature of Chinese characters is a basic theoretical problem in Chinese philology, for the recognition not only inhibits other problems of Chinese characters, but influences the whole Chinese character study. However, because of the current vague research object and indefinite criterion, the academic circle holds controversial ideas as to its nature. The paper aims to study commonly-used modern Chinese characters, adopts a scientific criterion, and applies the theory of constructism to analyze their semantic and phonetic function to quantify the nature.The paper comprises six parts:Part One: research analysis of the study of Chinese character natureFirst, to study the subject or the object, to research separately or combine it with the ancient Chinese, and to study the essence or generality, the researchers holds different opinions.Second, the ambiguous adoption of terms in research, either the same term with different meanings or the vice versus; different research objects and perspectives in the nature of Chinese characters.Part Two: research methodFirst, delimit " modern Chinese character" and make a qualitative study of its nature.Second, use the constructism theory to analyze and abandon the out-dated orthography theory.Third, take the character recording principle as criterion, namely to observe the symbol the character adopts and the approach it uses to connect with words and language. A combination of above two provides a way to define the nature of Chinese character.Part Three: quantitative analysisThe paper selects 3755 commonly-used words from "The Chinese Code Sign Collection and Base Collection of Information Exchange" as object, establishes 11 parameters per word, sets up data base, and analyzes their core meaning and construction including the semantic and phonetic complements of the traditional pictophonetics; seven types of construction are presented in the end and on this base comes the conclusion that modern Chinese characters are pure signs.Part Four: exploration of the natureWith thousands years of evolvement, the Chinese single-structured word and multiple-structured word have gradually lost the structure rationale to be pure signs attributable to the language internal system and the phonetic and semantic changes of the language development. In whatever sense, modern Chinese characters are pure signs.Part Five: the significance of the qualitative studyA qualitative study of Chinese characters enables us to rectify some misinterpretations of Chinese characters; meanwhile it plays an instructive role in Chinese teaching and Chinese information processing.Part Six: conclusionThe paper summarizes the researches mentioned, pointing out that the dialectical attitude to view modern Chinese characters and an objective evaluation is necessary to enhance the smooth proceeding of language modernization.