Comparative analysis of the concept “health”/“健康” in the Russian and Chinese languages

The proposed article presents a conceptual description of one of the main areas of human life: the concept of “health” and its explicants in Russian and Chinese. The authors consider the cultural-specific characteristics of these concepts in the linguistic consciousness and communicative behavior of the Chinese and Russians. This article compares and analyzes the semiotic and linguocultural space of the Russian concept “health” and the Chinese concept “健康”. Using the statistical data of the National Corpus of the Russian Language and the BCC Corpus of the Peking University of Language and Culture, the frequency and mechanisms of the metaphorical use of the words “health”/“健康” are revealed, and the zones of the semantic content of the concept “health” are also identified. The relevance of the presented study lies in the need for a correct understanding of the national mentality and national specifics of the concept of “health” in the Russian and Chinese linguistic consciousness and the desire, on the one hand, to better study the language and culture of the neighboring state and, on the other, to better understand the peculiarities of the worldview of carriers of another culture, which is built into the anthropocentric paradigm, which occupies a leading place in modern linguistics. It is concluded that concepts are fixed in the language and become a kind of subconscious of the individual, reflecting part of the ordinary worldview of a native speaker with its distinctive national features.