THE CONCEPT OF CHINA IN RUSSIAN AND ENGLISH LINGUISTIC WORLDVIEWS (ETYMOLOGY, WORD FORMATION AND PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS)

In recent decades, in connection with the processes globalization, the images of the countries and China as well become the subject of study in various spheres of Humanities. The ethnocultural components of Russian-Chinese relations are of key importance. However, this issue is understudied within the frames of the linguistic worldview. It occurs during the process of interaction of thinking, reality, and language and influences the results of the cognitive-linguistic activity. In the linguistic sphere, we will use the term “concept” instead of the notion of “image”. The paper covers the contrastive-comparative study of special aspects of the “China” concept functioning in Russian and English worldviews. The author of the paper considered the processes of assimilation of the “China” toponym meaning, carried out the comparative semantic analysis of selected derivatives of this concept lexical items, gathered the established terms with these lexical items in both languages, described their meanings and etymology, summarized the content of China concept basing on the Russian and English phraseological units. The materials for study and analysis were taken from T.F. Efremova’s “New dictionary of Russian language” (2008) and various English-Russian dictionaries and phrase books of recent years. All examples were received from Russian National Corpus and British National Corpus, and that fact shows the actual usage of these linguistic units. The study proves that, depending on various historical factors and reasons, the functioning of certain lexical units, phraseological units and free phrases of the “China” sphere of concepts differs considerably in Russian and English linguistic worldviews and requires further study. That is why this issue is topical now.