Structural Patterns of Chinese Characters

Chinese characters, as used in Chinese and Japanese for or-thography,* bear inherent meanings as well as sound shapes. Apart from these aspects, the graphic patterns of the characters also vary in complex ways and they appear very different over a wide range. It is obvious to native users of these characters, however, that the graphic patterns are mostly composed of different but frequently used subunits, and regularity is observed in the structures of character patterns. Quite frequently, a character is clearly composed of more than one character (with some minor modifications in shape). We can intuitively identify some commonly used strokes such as vertical and horizontal lines as constituents of characters or their sub-parts. These obvious structural regularities have not been studied thoroughly , in spite of accumulated knowledge concerning etymology and historical developments of the characters and interpretation of the sound-meaning association.** This paper describes a way of describing the regularities of the Chinese characters as graphic patterns, without any explicit reference to the sound or meaning. The description may be considered as given in a form of generative grammarl) * The authors are native Japanese, and we are primarily concerned with the Chinese characters used in the contemporary Japanese or-thography. There is obvious difference between Chinese and Japa-nese in the collection of character patterns used, but difference in the structural regularity itself is not apparent and remains to be studied.