A Cognitive Approach to Character Formation in the Oracle Bone Script

This paper attempts to apply the cognitive linguistic framework in explaining character formation in the oracle bone script, the oldest extant form of the Chinese script. The oracle bone script was used in Bronze Age China to write the Shang Chinese language for divinatory purposes. It is shown that together with the previously known mechanisms of icono-pictography and the rebus principle, cognitive mechanisms such as metonymy and synecdoche played a significant role in the character formation of the oracle bone script. Furthermore, it is argued that all the aforesaid mechanisms can be explained by means of the reference point construction.