중국어의 도상성에 대한 분석 - Research on the Iconicity of Chinese

Abstract

By investigation, this thesis thinks that the Iconicity of Chineseexists in all levels such as pronunciation, words and expressions, syntaxand so on and analyzes its generative mechanism. The Iconicity ofChinese pronunciation lies in onomatopoeic word, Iconicity ofpronunciation and meaning, and tone. First of all, the generation ofonomatopoeic word has close relationship with things in the nature. Onomatopoeic word is vivid delineation of external world, shows thesound of nature world and human beings, and reflects the similaritybetween real world and symbols. Secondly, at the early stage of thegeneration of Chinese, the pronunciation and meaning of words comefrom things in the nature. They imitate all kinds of natural sounds andtake the meanings of the sounds. The similarity of pronunciation andmeaning specifically lies in using same or similar pronunciations toexpress things that have common characteristics. Finally, the tone ofChinese also shows pronunciation similarity. Tone can not onlydifferentiate semantic meanings, but also reflect characteristics ofdifferent things. Chinese is typical ideography. Chinese characters and words havevery high Iconicity. This thesis divides the similarity on this level intoChinese characters and compound words, and then has furtherdiscussion. According to its coinage principle, Chinese can be divided intopictographic character, self-explanatory character, associative compoundcharacter, synonymous character, pictophonetic character and phoneticloan character, and among which, the similarity of pictographic characterdescribing natural world is the highest and the similarity of phoneticloan character, which is totally different from borrowed character patternand meaning, is the lowest. The similarity of Chinese compound words ismainly reflected in compound words that show coordinating relation,including time sequence, whole-part sequence, center-surround sequenceand speaker-centered sequence etc. The Iconicity of Chinese syntax is showed in sequence Iconicity,distance Iconicity, quantity Iconicity and markedness Iconicity. SequenceIconicity refers to that word order is in parallel with the occurrencesequence of events and concepts in language linear arrangement. And thecomponents of syntax are arranged according to time sequence or spacesequence. Distance Iconicity refers to that language sign distance issimilar to concept distance and it is mainly reflected in the relationshipof modifier and central word. Quantity Iconicity refers to that the syntaxcomponents of important, quantified and complicated information arelarge and the forms are complicated. Markedness is similar to extrameaning. The sequence for markedness to develop from nothing is similarto the natural sequence of cognition, and that’s markedness similarity. Language is reflected through human’s cognition process and its processis objective world→ cognition→ concept→ language form. That’s to say,language similarity is not just about reflecting objective world directly,and the more important thing is to reflect people’s cognition mode onexternal world. There are rules for people to know the world and theserules will inevitably be reflected on language forms.