A Study On The Semiotic System And Mechanism Of The Chinese Riddles

Chinese riddle is a complex semiotic system,which results from the application of language in its explicit and implicit way. The complex semiotic system of Chinese riddles is made up of three subsystems, which are content, hint and answer. Three subsystems, which are preset relevant and generative, are dependent with each other. Its function is to keep the lines of communication smoothly between riddlers and riddle guessers. This is also a coding and decoding process. Riddles are set following signified and signifier or deviating from the Chinese characters and their combination relations, including the Chinese characters form, structure, speech, vocabulary of pun and rhetorical metaphor, of pragmatic presupposition, correlation, etc. Guessing riddles, a cognitive activity, is a coding and decoding process by figuring out the hint in the riddles according to context, the relevance of cognitive metaphors and so on. The maze of the riddle is the elements and structure of the language and its combination and generative semiotic system. Riddlers usually provide some prompt messages for guessers, which are rhetoric including metaphor, pun, homophonic and etc. They belong to metaphor category from the perspective of contemporary cognitive linguistics, especially Lei Kefu’s “conceptual metaphor”. From the point of riddle metaphor, its discourse symbols always try to set out from familiar things to the things hidden behind the riddle of ontology mapping, and then guessers can get the answer to a riddle. Of course riddlers can also set off from the old things in order to establish a new understanding of the things. The riddle dialogue is cognition between designs and resigns. At this point, riddles embody the characteristics of its discourse as metaphor.