A Semiotic and Cognitive Analysis of Chinese Iconic Signs1

Abstract

Unlike alphabetic letters, Chinese characters, as orthographic symbols, can represent the meaning of a word. According to Peirce’s triadic division of signs, we believe that a Chinese character is an iconic sign for the referent that its meaning denotes; that is to say, there is something perceptually in common between the character and its denotatum; however, we could be misled by the simple definition of this “similarity” because perceptual experience is not naive but something conventional. Based on the degree of conventionality among iconic signs, we distinguish their iconic nature (i.e., iconicity) into primary and secondary kinds - the former having an obvious similarity between the sign and its referent and the latter showing a sophisticated reflection of an analogical relationship. The construction of the Chinese character system has resulted from the superposition of different iconic relationships, while their differentiation has led to the classification of Chinese characters playing an important role in the recognition of their meanings.