ON THE CONCEPT FROM A CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

This paper aims to compare how concept was viewed from the perspective of Russian and Chinese linguoculture. Our analysis is based on the works by famous Russian and Chinese linguists and their followers engaged in linguocultural studies. The results show the following. In Russian linguoculturology, the analysis of the content of concepts has established itself as the key method for studying culture. While the field was developing, two major research approaches emerged: the cognitive-psychological approach and the culturological approach. The former views the concept as a phenomenon of individual consciousness of psychophysiological nature and existing in the form of elementary units of knowledge, the latter interprets it as a complex carrier of a nation's collective cultural information and as an instrument for historical-cultural interpretation. This article examines the concept precisely from the culturological perspective. Our choice is motivated by the correspondence of this approach with the number of crucial tasks for contemporary China: the in-depth exploration, preservation and transmission of national cultural heritage, as well as the formation of a holistic international cultural image of the country. From culturological positions, the article analyzes the functions of the concept in transmitting, generating and storing cultural information along with its inherent properties such as polylingualism, hierarchical structure and transformability. The study also showed that FAMILY concept sphere and its constituents were found to be common for Russian and Chinese linguocultures. However, dominant concepts varied with NATURE, ETHICS and MORALE in Chinese and POWER, LAW, PEOPLE and WILL in Russian.