In the literature,Mandarin <i>ziji</i> “self” has been fitted into various grammatical categories, such as <i>reflexive pronoun, locally-bound anaphor, long-distance reflexive, adnominal/adverbial intensifier</i>, etc. Different from previous grammatical analyses, the author argues that <i>ziji</i>, as a lexeme, has two types of senses, namely, the <i>primary sense</i>, i.e. “self” and the <i>secondary sense</i>, which includes <i>speaker’s reflection, speaker’s identification, participant’s reflection, unexpectedness, exclusion of others, focused identity</i>, etc. These secondary senses not only help <i>ziji</i> to be linked to a referent in discourse but also distinguish it from the three-way personal pronouns in Mandarin. By resorting to a group of randomly-generated examples from the BCC corpus, the author finds out that <i>speaker’s reflection</i> and <i>speaker’s identification</i> are the most frequent secondary senses of <i>ziji</i> (each accounts for 81% or 61% of <i>ziji</i>), whereas <i>participant’s reflection</i> (i.e. logophoricity) is the lest frequent one (i.e. 8% of <i>ziji</i>). Thus, the author defines the former two secondary senses as 常义<i>habitual senses</i> (i.e. senses that are most or very likely to be present when <i>ziji</i> is used in utterances) and the rest ones as偶义<i>occasional senses</i> (i.e. senses that are relatively less likely to be present when <i>ziji</i> is used in utterances). The significance of this demarcation lies in an understanding that there is always an asymmetrical distribution among the secondary senses of a lexeme, which, hopefully, predicts how it may be used or understood in the most relevant way.