Iconicity in Mandarin: Directional Complement

Bahasa Indonesia does not have the complement of direction quxiang buyu 趋向补语 as Mandarin, because the Indonesians are not used to thinking iconically like the Chinese. That is, an idea is parallel to language. This parallel between thinking and language is called iconicity. The research question is what kind of directions are in the complement. The goal is to understand different types of direction complement, such as zoushanglai 走上来, paochuqu 跑出去, xiexialai 写下来.. The theory used is Peirce's iconicity theory which is within the scope of semiotics. The method used is to compare word order with action-direction sequences so that parallelism between thought-language or iconicity embodied in the form of complementary direction. This research shows that Chinese people always have compound directive words like VVlai or VVqu to explicit their mind towards or leave the speaker. This kind of idea embodied in the form of directional complement. The directional complement posited after the predicate verbal. The result shows the visible likeness expressing the paralel is due to the paralellism of thought and language or iconic in semiotics.