The Peircean Sign as a Model for Interpreting Semiotic Structures in Mandarin Chinese

The notion that language is a system of signs is explored in the context of Mandarin Chinese. We use the Peircean Sign, derived from the Peircean ontological categories Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, as an interpretive framework. Because Mandarin Chinese is both well-documented and comparatively opaque to foreign influences, it presents an ideal case study for the formation of semiotic structures based on the operation of a single Peircean Category-sign(in contrast to English, which, with much higher levels of foreign contact-induced change, would be expected to involve a broad mixture of various semiotic influences). We examine semiotic structures in Chinese at the featural/phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactic levels, as well as the inventory of written characters. We conclude that the primary constraint that conditions semiotic structures in Chinese is the Peircean category Firstness of Secondness/[12]. We also show how this conditioning constraint imposes a semiotic and structural consistency across different levels of language, and how it helps to explain certain evolutionary characteristics of Chinese.