Semiotics is one of the core concepts in contemporary philosophy,linguistics and many other ideological fields.Although it is a new discipline founded in the 20th century,researchers from both the East and the West ha...Semiotics is one of the core concepts in contemporary philosophy,linguistics and many other ideological fields.Although it is a new discipline founded in the 20th century,researchers from both the East and the West have studied the phenomena of symbols for a long time.Western semiotics came into existence as a new discipline during the 1960s,whose origin could be traced back to ancient Greek philosophy.In ancient China,there was no concept of semiotics,but Chinese ancestors practiced divination by some special symbols,which might be considered the sprouts of semiotics.Those methods in divination were called Lianshanyi in the Xia Dynasty and Guizangyi in the Shang Dynasty.In the Zhou Dynasty,the forms of divinations and their explanations were more plentiful,which were collectively called Zhouyi,posing as"the leading classics and the source of‘Tao’".The study on Zhouyi found that its symbolic concepts possessed explainable relevance to those in Western semiotics represented by Saussure,Peirce and Morris,especially between the three key elements:"hexagram image","hexagram judgment"and"hexagram meaning"in Zhouyi corresponding to the three core formulas:"Sign=Signifier+Signified","Sign=Relation(Medium,Object,Interpret)"and"M=ME+MP+MF"of Western semiotics.The study suggested that exploration into the symbolic concepts of ancient Chinese philosophical classics might provide new perspectives for the interpretation of Western semiotics.展开更多
文摘Semiotics is one of the core concepts in contemporary philosophy,linguistics and many other ideological fields.Although it is a new discipline founded in the 20th century,researchers from both the East and the West have studied the phenomena of symbols for a long time.Western semiotics came into existence as a new discipline during the 1960s,whose origin could be traced back to ancient Greek philosophy.In ancient China,there was no concept of semiotics,but Chinese ancestors practiced divination by some special symbols,which might be considered the sprouts of semiotics.Those methods in divination were called Lianshanyi in the Xia Dynasty and Guizangyi in the Shang Dynasty.In the Zhou Dynasty,the forms of divinations and their explanations were more plentiful,which were collectively called Zhouyi,posing as"the leading classics and the source of‘Tao’".The study on Zhouyi found that its symbolic concepts possessed explainable relevance to those in Western semiotics represented by Saussure,Peirce and Morris,especially between the three key elements:"hexagram image","hexagram judgment"and"hexagram meaning"in Zhouyi corresponding to the three core formulas:"Sign=Signifier+Signified","Sign=Relation(Medium,Object,Interpret)"and"M=ME+MP+MF"of Western semiotics.The study suggested that exploration into the symbolic concepts of ancient Chinese philosophical classics might provide new perspectives for the interpretation of Western semiotics.
