Abstract: The theory of sinigram as the basic unit argues that Chinese studies should be based on sinigram since sinigram is the basic unit in Chinese. This is a new theory and it is revolution in the Chinese philosophy of language. The theory influences not only Chinese studies but also English-Chinese contrastive studies in methodology and research domain. Many problems could also be solved according to this theory. Introduction The basic unit of language is the nuclear in language studies. Therefore, linguists attempt to find out the basic unit of the target language during their studies. Chinese linguists try their best to find out the basic unit and have proposed kinds of basic unit theories, which are based on ‘word’ in European languages (especially English), not the basic unit of Chinese language in nature, which could not solve all the basic problems of language successfully. After summing up the slips of Chinese studies in 20th century, Wang Ailu, Xu Tongqiang, Wang Hongjun, Pan Wenguo, Wang Ping, Lu Chuan et al successively proposed the theory of sinigram, of which the representative figures are Xu Tongqiang and Pan Wenguo, integrating the Chinese features. The theory of sinigram as the basic unit argues that Chinese studies should be based on sinigram since sinigram is the basic unit in Chinese. The distinction between ‘word’ and ‘sinigram’ is that ‘word’ is based on grammar studies, while ‘sinigram’ is based on meaning studies. This is a new theory and ‘it is a revolution in the Chinese philosophy of language.’(Pan, 2017) ‘The theory influences not only Chinese studies but also English-Chinese contrastive studies in methodology and research domain.’(Pan, 2017) Furthermore, the theory of sinigram is not only a subject of Chinese studies, but also a subject of general linguistics. Therefore, the study of this theory should be in the direction of the viewpoints of Chinese studies and also of general linguistics and language contrastive studies.’(Pan, 2017) Based on this theory, we may have a further analysis about the Chinese character, word, and their morphological changes. Since ‘word’ is the basic unit in English, while ‘Chinese character’ is the basic unit in Chinese, they determine the features of their own languages respectively. The first thing we should do is to study the similarities and differences between ‘word’ and ‘Chinese character’ before we have the English-Chinese contrastive studies, so as not to be influenced by the limitation of the features of character itself, when it comes to the Chinese word-building and its morphology. ‘We must capture the nature of language, which is covered by the character.’ Fang Guangtao has ever said in one of his eight principles of Chinese grammar study. Chinese character is a kind of syllable-morpheme, which is very helpful for us to recognize and define the features of Chinese morphemes. However, the forms of Chinese character always let us inadvertently neglect language (or oral) features, for instance, some phonetic features and phonetic changes, and even confuse the distinction between ‘word’ and ‘Chinese character’, so that the confusion between lexical meaning of one morpheme or one word and its grammatical meaning makes it seem that one Chinese character is equal to one word. For example, one character which could only be attached to a noun referring to human to express plural form‘群’and ‘们’, has been regarded as an independent word. It makes a lexical problem became a gr，英语论文题目，英语论文 |
