SEMANTICS OF LEXEMES 善 "GOOD" AND 恶 "EVIL" IN THE CHINESE LANGUAGE

Li Yongnuo

Good and evil are important ethical concepts in traditional Chinese culture, the formation and development of which are closely related to such factors as the social history, culture and religion of China. The purpose of the article is to determine the semantics of the words 善 «good» and 恶 «evil» in Chinese society by constructing a semantic field. The study was carried out on the material of the words 善 «good» and 恶 «evil», recorded in the Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese of the State Committee for Work in the Field of Language and Writing (国家语委现代汉语通用平衡语料库) and the Language Corpus of the Center for Chinese Linguistics at Peking University (北大语言中心CCL语料库). The article reveals the semantics of the studied words in Chinese society: good, as a positive value, is associated with truth and beauty; evil, being a negative property, should be controlled. The lexemes good and evil are dialectically opposite and at the same time united.

Keywords:semantics, lexeme 善 «good», lexeme 恶 «evil», Chinese society, method of constructing a semantic field