A Study Of Variants From The Perspective Of Semiotics

The variant Chinese characters play an important role in Chinese character system.Its physical structure shows people’s different cognitive perspectives and cognitive habits,which is of great significance to the study of Chinese character.With the help of semiotic theory,the thesis analyzes the characteristics of variant Chinese characters from three aspects: the essence,rules and spread of them,summarizes their changing laws,and reflects on the gains and losses of semiotics in explaining the phenomenon of the variants.Variant Chinese characters refer to different forms,but they are commonly recognized or used by people in a certain period of time to refer to the same word.It is a symbol marked by motivation and two-side ambiguity.And in terms of different kinds of Chinese character relationships,the difference between the ancient-and-later forms of characters and the phonetic loan characters is greater than the phonetic loan characters and the variant character.Meanwhile,the latter has a greater degree of difference than the ancient-and-later forms of Chinese characters and the variant characters.Variant characters have their own features of "form" and "meaning" which are called "encoding" and "decoding" in this paper.The encoding of the variants can be divided into two types: variants that have exactly the same meaning in any case,and variants that have only a portion of the same meaning.The program detection model of the latter variant characters is listed.The decoding of the variants emphasizes the role of humans in the recognition of Chinese characters.The positive effect is that people can identify the variant characters through deduction of the prototype,while the negative effect is that over-and under-explanation may occur.In addition to meaning interpretation,there are many other directions,such as aesthetic interpretation,cultural interpretation,and ideological interpretation.Classification,the reasons of existence and sources are three different perspectives of studying variant characters.In terms of classification,the variants can be classified into three types: cognitive coding,scientific logical coding,and aesthetic coding.According to existence,practicality is the essential reason for the spread of variant characters.From the source,in the birth stage,the diversity of human cognition and the transformation of cognition provided the conditions for the birth of variant characters.In the development stage,the dual factors of internal and external factors affected the generation of variant characters.The advantage of using semiotics to study variant characters is that the semiotics can help to solve basic problems such as the conceptual connotation of the variants.It can point out the meaning of variant characters,thereby enhancing the status of them in the study of Chinese characters,and providing an operable platform for the interdisciplinary research of Chinese character studies.The shortcoming is that it is difficult for semiotics to describe the details of the Chinese character system.The research cannot involve more details in the horizontal direction,nor can it dig deeper in the vertical direction.The research theory is fragmented rather than systematic.The study of variant characters is a need to promote the development of Chinese semiotics.A comprehensive analysis of its internal phenomenon is conducive to in-depth exploration of Chinese semiotics,which not only has practical significance for the development of domestic semiotics,but also promotes the harmonious exchange and organic integration of traditional Chinese character studies and Western advanced science.