6533b85afe1ef96bd12b9c73

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Iconicity and semantics in sinographic typology

subject

description

From the 1980s, the notion of iconicity is frequently used in linguistics to describe the motivated relationship between the forms of the object and their meanings. Over the past hundred years, researchers from various countries have successively discovered iconic relationships between specific linguistic structures and structures of human experience, observable phenomena in various languages. As an ideographic script, linguistic studies always consider Chinese script as a special case compared to other scripts in linguistic study. Therefore, the problems of iconicity are mentioned much less regarding Chinese writing. In fact, by discovering the origin of the characters of this writing, we realize that the problem of graphic iconicity deserves further study. Our studies are therefore interested in exposing the phenomena of iconicity in Chinese writing and especially the degree and the different types of iconicity in the different styles of Chinese writing, and in particular in the Six Classifications (liùshū 六书), the most orthodox classification of writing that has existed for over two thousand years in China. How the typology of graphic iconicity is marked in Chinese writing is one of the main questions we discuss in this thesis. From the point of view of iconicity, we then bring a coordinated (common) reflection on the question of sinographic typology which could help to consider the current taxonomic conflict on the true nature of Chinese characters. By analyzing the extent of the semantic motivation of the Chinese character, we first have an overview of the typology of iconicity in this ideographic script. The in-depth analyzes lead us to reinterpret the different types of Chinese characters, which examine the characteristics of the sinograms from the angle of iconicity and then to perform a deconstruction of the Chinese characters. Finally, a reconstruction is necessary, which leads us to study the relevance of the representation of the nature of the Chinese language in the teaching of foreign languages.