Cognitive Analysis Of Oracle Characters

Since Oracle characters were discovered in1899, many scholars have been studying onthem for more than100years, and they have made brilliant achievements. However, theirresearching results mainly lie in verifying and explaining the characters, organizing andpatching the materials, and studying Shang Dynasty history as well as reviewing bookscombined with the literature. There are some scholars studying the relationship between theform and meaning of the Oracle characters, but they take the studies mainly throughtraditional approaches. Recently, with the development of cognitive linguistics, it becomesmore popular to analyze Chinese characters from the cognitive perspective, but the studies areoverwhelmingly towards the modern simplified characters. It seems that few scholars havestudied and explored Oracle characters from the cognitive perspective. To discover thegeneration mechanism of the Oracle characters and the relationship between the configurationand the meaning of them, this essay investigates1,127Oracle characters (there are in fact1,093characters left concerning the study after the elimination of34characters which ownthe same configuration in Oracle inscriptions but develop into different characters withdifferent constructions later) in Dictionary of Oracle Characters (the Second Version). Basedon Liu Shu Theory, the1,093Oracle characters are classified into four categories: pictographs,self-explanatory characters, associative compounds and pictophonetic characters. Eachcategory is further divided into prototypical characters and aprototypical ones. It is found thatnearly all the Oracle characters are with the characteristic of “expressing the meaning by theform”, that is to say the relationship between the form and meaning is iconic. At the sametime, after analyzing iconicity of each category of characters, it is found that differentcategories of characters represent different types of iconicity which shows a weakening trendfrom the pictographs to associative compounds. Furthermore, after we have studied theconfigurations of each category of characters, it is found that Oracle characters and theiriconicity between the configuration and meaning are derived from the image schemas; thecharacters in different categories are based on different types of image schemas. That is whydifferent categories of characters represent different types of iconicity. All the pictographs arebased on the static image schema; self-explanatory characters are mainly based on the imageschema with the half-static feature; and most associative compounds are based on thekinesthetic image schemas, and that explains why iconicity of Oracle characters shows aweakening trend from pictographs to associative compounds. Meanwhile, this study also amends the views that iconicity lies primarily in sound and meaning iconicity, lexical-syntactic iconicity, discourse iconicity and order iconicity, deepening the use and study oficonicity, broadening the field of cognitive linguistic and laying the foundation for cognitivelinguistic studies in Oracle characters.