Chinese Character Semantics

There exist 210 semantic components that are used for dictionary look-up and classification of characters, and each semantic component forms on average 20 composite semantic-phonetic characters,

but with great variation, from 扌 (for 'hand' or associated actions) appearing in 328 composite characters, to 身 ('body') in six composites. Chinese characters are built on combinations of semantic and phonetic elements, which may bear a somewhat more visually meaningful relationship, albeit inexact, between lexis, sound, and meaning than the more arbitrary and conventionalized relationships between writing, pronunciation, and lexis in Western writing systems; for example, the 'water' component 氵 (from 水([shuǐ], water))appears in words with a physical relationship or connection to water, such as 汽([qŒ], steam, vapor) and 江([jiāng], river). It is also used more metaphorically, as in 治([zhŒ], govern, rule, manage), likely from a nautical metaphor, with further extended meanings like 'treat, cure'. It also occurs in characters with very abstract meanings, where any metaphorical relationship is no longer apparent, e.g., 没([méi], no, not). Such a component appears in a variety of word types—related directly, indirectly, or very opaquely with water (or not at all), and including count nouns, mass nouns, verbs, and function words.

The form of the water component 氵 would be likely be perceived as relatively iconic (loosely speaking), or visually suggestive of its meaning (e.g., moving or flowing water). Some component forms could be less iconic or suggestive, such as 黑([hēi], black, dark) where the form is more arbitrary or stylized, rather than visually suggestive of meaning. Thus, the former would be more semantically transparent, while the latter would be less transparent. Transparency, then, would be defined as how strongly a component form would be perceived as being visually suggestive, iconic, or easily associated with the component meaning; transparency, of course, would depend on the subjective perceptions of literate speakers and readers of Chinese. Semantic relatedness of components is another semantic dimension of interest. In a character like 江 jiang 'river', the water component is closely related to the meaning of this character for 'river,' but would be perceived as less related to the meaning of 治([zhŒ], govern), and much less related to the meaning of 没([méi], no). This degree of semantic relatedness is referred to in this dissertation as semantic regularity, analogous to the term ‘phonological regularity’ (the correspondence of a phonogram to the whole character pronunciation).

Some components vary greatly in semantic regularity; e.g., within the component family of characters built from the 'hand' component 扌, component-character relatedness varies considerably from 打([d2], hit, beat) to the semantically opaque 捌([bā], eight). Other components show less variability; such as the ‘ice’ component 冫, which appears more consistently in terms for weather, temperature, or ice. This degree of variability is termed semantic consistency (analogous to phonological consistency), and captures the degree of variation in component-character relatedness for a given component and its component family of characters.

  One factor implicated in studies of Chinese, English, and other languages is semantic concreteness, i.e., how a word meaning would be perceived on a concreteness-abstractness continuum, ranging from tangible, physical, imageable or concrete, to abstract, indefinite, or intangible. The effects of concreteness in English psycholinguistics are well attested, and more recent studies have implicated word or character level concreteness as factors in neuroimaging or processing studies of Chinese. For Chinese character perception, two types of concreteness could be considered: the concreteness of the component meaning, and the concreteness of the whole character meaning.

  One caveat regarding component semantics is in order. Given the role of semantics in the writing system, one might expect to find these semantic patterns and principals involved in the mental representation and processing of Chinese characters. However, one must be wary of drawing simplistic links between character form and meaning, as in the ideographic or semibiographical fallacy), whereby it is assumed that characters provide a “direct” representation of meaning. Semantic character components are often seemingly arbitrary or opaque with respect to the whole character meaning. While, for example, words related to emotions often contain the 'heart' component心([xīn], heart), there is no analogous character for words related to logic or cognition; the system is merely arbitrary. Iconicity works best for object and mass nouns and relational terms (e.g., spatial prepositions). Words of intermediate abstractness such as 'give' have too many abstract elements for meaningful graphical representation (e.g., transfer of possession, transitivity), and very abstract terms (e.g., ‘existential’ or ‘demeanor’) could only be depicted in a most arbitrary, selective, and metaphorical manner.