Abstract

The article explores the concept of "conscience" in three language pictures of the world - Russian, French and Chinese. The study is contrastive, the results obtained are compared. The description of each concept is made according to a clear algorithm: the etymology of the word, the mythological roots of the concept, its compatibility are studied, the material connotation is singled out from the compatibility according to V. A. Uspensky, dictionary definitions are compared. The purpose of the study is to identify the features of the representation of the concept of "conscience" in different cultures using the material of the semantic field in Russian, French and Chinese, then making a comparison in order to see similarities and differences in the worldview picture of different peoples. This topic is understudied, earlier there were no linguoculturological studies analyzing Russian, French and Chinese cultures, which is the scientific novelty of this work. As a result, a clear difference in the ideas of conscience in the three studied cultures was established. For a Russian person, conscience is an internal judge who punishes him when he commits an evil deed; for the French, conscience has no connection with power over a person, and even often yields to it; for the Chinese, conscience is a guide that a person can follow or deny. The results obtained will contribute to the establishment of mutual understanding between cultures, forming a kind of conceptual bridge.