ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors have synthesized a wide range of the views of insiders and outsiders of the nature of the Chinese language and how it is written. In the course of Wang’s research, she finds that concepts as basic as word and sentence have been forced onto Chinese by scholars who assumed that they were universals equally applicable to Indo-European and Chinese language. Only when the authors are satisfied that she has a functional description of the nature of written Chinese can they then examine the applicability of the transactional Sociopsycholinguistic theory of the reading process to the reading of Chinese. But the focus of research from the perspective of scientific realism is on building a theory of the structures and processes in the aspect of reality under study.
