ABSTRACT
In traditional Confucian culture, the written script was regarded and utilized as a tool to transform society and regulate social conduct. Since the flourishing of calligraphy in the Han dynasty, the written script has become one of the most sublime Chinese arts, reflecting individuals’ aesthetic tastes and spiritual pursuits. Worse than that, though, is perception that new or modern ideas or concepts cannot be expressed in the Chinese language because there is no new character for it. To understand how readers of Chinese transact with and thus make sense of Chinese texts, the authors examine written Chinese and its cueing systems in this chapter from the perspective of a transactional sociopsycholinguistic view of reading, writing, and written text. Following Goodman’s interpretations of the language cueing systems, the authors discuss written Chinese from three levels: graphomorphemic, syntactic and grammatical, and semantic-pragmatic. Goodman uses the term graphophonic to refer to the cues readers pick up at the graphic and phonological levels of English.
