The Ideational Function of Ideograms and Textual Research of the Chinese Ancient Writing

Ideograms are characters that convey certain meanings, including: a) the meaning carried by the character itself; b) the meaning of language units (i.e., a word or a morpheme) that are encoded by the character; and c) the semantic relationship between the first two kinds of meanings—— the denotative meaning assigned to the coined words. Among the three kinds of meanings, the meaning encoded by the characters is the core component of the semantics of the ideograms, the essential of characters. The paper distinguishes characters and pictographic symbols, and highlights the ideational functions of the ideograms.This helps researchers to differentiate written characters from parole, the meaning of characters from the meaning of phrases so that they can interpret the ancient writing in a correct way.