CLASSIFICATION OF CHINESE CHARACTERS FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ITS CONSTITUENT ELEMENTS

Abstract

Chinese characters are a system of symbols to record the Chinese language. Chinese characters belong to the type of ideogramic text, each character is composed of three components: Sound (the sound of the word), Shape (the shape of the word) and Meaning (the meaning of the word). These three elements are interrelated to convey the complete information of a Chinese character. In the early days, each Chinese character corresponded to a word representing a complete concept. In modern Chinese, the number of polysyllabic words dominates the lexical system, each Chinese character basically corresponds to a word structure element. Along with linguistic changes and developments, the constitutive elements of Chinese characters have also altered. This transformation leads to a change in the internal information of those characters. With the number of up to thousands of different characters, Chinese characters are classified into many types according to different criteria. In this article, we conduct a study to classify Chinese characters from the perspective of the relationship among their constituent elements, thereby contributing to the research, teaching and learning of Chinese characters.