What do the Characters Mean?

Honey, David B. "The Word Behind the Graph in Classical Chinese: Three Notes on the Logographic Writing System." Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association 26, no. 4 (October 1989): 15-26.
Summary

In this article the author argues that although people think that Chinese is easy because its lack of grammatical tense, gender, and other 'syntactical signposts.' The learner of Classical Chinese soon wishes that these things did exist, because the grammatical function of a character is not apparent in the graph or the phonological aspect of the character. Although the structures of the characters do not change, depending on the context, the grammatical functions of the character can. In order to fully understand the meaning of the characters one has to 'approach Classical Chinese in terms of the words represented be the graphs.' For example 中 means middle and is one of the first characters that students learn, but in the classical phrase 「射者必中礼」(the archer must center on ritual) the 中 means 'to center.' This apparent change in means is not as radical as it can be in some cases. This is all possible through the logographic nature of the script. The article is then broken down into three different ways 'in which the words function behind the graph.' First, Polygraphy means that several graphs can represent the same word. This function is possible because graphs are often borrowed for their sound. Several graphs with the same sound can be used interchangeably to mean any one specific character. Early Chinese was phonographic, one character, one sound. And so the graphs were just used for their sound only and not for any inherent meaning behind them. Second, Polysemy means that one character can represent several different words. For example, 「独樂樂，孰樂？」the 樂 character is used three times, but each time it is pronounced a different way, with the first two together meaning music and the last one meaning 'to enjoy.' This can be understood by understanding that both meanings/words come from the same root even though over time they have changed. As in the English 'practical' and 'practice' both come from the Latin 'practicus.' The third is polyptoton, which means the same character used in two grammatical functions. More specifically this is where a character serves two different grammatical roles in one sentence, or is used in its regular fashion in addition to being used grammatically.

Creel, Herrlee Glessner. Chinese Writing. Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 1943.

The main point of the article is two-fold. The first part is showing the pictographic nature within many characters and how they evolved overtime to look like and mean what they do. Characters are put together to form a sentence which is then broken apart to show how the characters' meaning is changed depending on the context. The second part of the article breaks down a phrase written in literary Chinese to show that even more inference and background knowledge is required to understand it. After each character in the saying is explained then the background story behind the phrase is shared. Even with that much insight it is still a leap between the two meanings. Context is one of the most important ways to understand what is really meant.