On the Question of changing the Chinese Language Picture of the World on the example of the functioning of the lexemes jia/ jiating ‘family, home’

The family traditionally plays a primary role in Chinese culture, being the prototype of the cosmogonic principle of the structure of the universe in general and social relations in the country in particular. Confucius also laid the basis of the entire state structure on the principle of filial piety, which requires the younger to honor the elders, so that the son honors the father, the wife honors the husband, and the subject honors his emperor ^{[19; 21]}. Thus the whole state was a sprawling feudal family, the head of which stood the Emperor: ‘four seas as brothers’, ? ‘relatives like a family’, ‘family, like brothers and sisters’, ‘mass base’, ‘big family United nationalities’.

Traditionally, the bride left her father's house and lived in her husband's house, but sometimes there were cases when the son-in-law lived in the wife's house with her relatives ^[7]. The presence of sons in marriage was not only desirable ( ’to give birth to a child-to take care of old age'), but also a necessary condition for performing rituals in the ancestral temple, because according to tradition only men could take care of the genus and perform sacrifices. Recall that the cult of ancestors was extremely important for Confucian society, because it fostered humanity and instilled a sense of duty, this is the only cult that can be confidently positioned as widespread throughout China ^[14]. If the spouse could not give birth to a boy, the husband was allowed to take a concubine, or the family could resort to adoption ( fox), which was also practiced quite often ^[28]. It can be said that the heyday of the cult of the family and the clan came at the time of Confucius, and the family is still "considered the core of society, the interests of the family are incomparably more important than the interests of its individual members" ^{[25, p. 132]}.

According to Chinese ideas, the Jia family is not just a ‘family with three generations living under one roof’ ^[1], this concept includes the entire family clan, which includes numerous near and distant relatives, home, native places, the so–called “small homeland”. In other words, the signs of a family can serve as kinship by blood or marriage, community of property and economic independence. Suffice it to recall that the peasant family in China consisted of a number of small patriarchal families, who from generation to generation jointly cultivated the same allotment of land, and its core was the already mentioned strict subordination of the younger members of the genus in relation to the elders ^[18], while everyone was responsible for the rest, which sometimes It led to tragic consequences when the guilty family was destroyed ( ‘there are no whole eggs in an inverted nest, as in meaning: nothing can survive in a big catastrophe’), or, conversely, it turned out to be beneficial for everyone when a family member was promoted ( ' 'as in meaning. he took a high position, and people close to him also got power’).

In the synonymic row with token ? also include words such as: ‘family house’; ‘home; family, clan’, ‘name, family, family’, / ‘the whole family’, ‘good family; a respectable family; good breeding; a rich house’, ? ‘yard, family, genus’, ‘housing’, ‘home’, of Beihai Park ‘family, genus; home; social situation of the family; the followers of the school; mentor’, ‘the rich owner of the house, a family living in a traditional house of the old sample’, 'Paradise; a cozy nest’ ^{[3; 4; 15; 27; 34; 36]}. The morpheme is also present in the word "state, country, nation", which indicates that the Chinese, being collectivists by nature, perceive their country as a home or family, and accordingly assess their place in it.

The traditionally reverent attitude to their ancestors, to their neighbors and distant relatives, and tells such an extensive vocabulary, as 'race, clan; family; family, household’, ðîäíÿ, ‘relatives, the relatives; relatives’ ( ‘kinship’, ‘family Council’, ‘relationships’, 'to avoid to keep in the service of the family; old. the rule that the chief and his subordinates should not be related’), ‘family, house; b’, ?z? ‘race, clan; surname ( ‘three of a kind (father, mother, wife); relatives; relatives’, ‘whole family’, ? ‘branch of the family; the branch of the family’, ‘the eldest of the family, the eldest branch of the family; the offspring of the eldest son’, ‘side line, the second branch of the family’, ? ‘race; family; relatives’ ( ‘his relatives is 11 branches’), ‘race, clan; relatives’, 'genus, family, clan’, ‘relatives, family members, relatives; the clan’.

Previously, such terms of kinship were also significant for persons on the part of the bride and groom, such as: ‘maternal home, parental family (of a married woman)’, ‘mother's family; wife's family; father-in-law and mother-in-law; old. the family of the Empress, father-in-law and mother-in-law of Emperor; the second family (on the side); the other wife on the side, kept woman’, family parents (relatives) wife’, ‘the husband's family’, / mouth. ‘the groom's family’, / ‘the bride’.

Thus, the relationship between relatives has always been socially significant in China, determining not only the norms of behavior within the family, but also having a significant impact on the legal regulation of the social sphere as a whole. For example, in the time of Confucius, "all relatives were clearly divided into two categories: nei tzu ("relatives on the inner line") and wai tzu ("relatives on the outer line"). The first was always preferred, because they were relatives on the father's side, the second – on the mother's side" ^{[18, p. 19]}. Moreover, within the closely related male branch of the family, there was also a differentiation of blood ties: for the bonds between father and son, the lexeme was used, and for the relations between brothers, the lexeme?.

Speaking about the shifts observed in the modern Chinese language in the functioning of kinship terms, one of the most ancient term systems in the language, which, according to some data, has 274 terms ^{[6, p. 106]}, it can be noted that at the end of the XX century, this long-established terminology significantly expanded the scope of use, especially among young people. If earlier terms such as ‘aunt’, , (referring to a man the same age as his father or older), (to a friend of his father, a man of the same generation or age with his father) were used in relation to unrelated older generation, now the names of relatives have entered youth usage everywhere, regardless of Degrees of familiarity: (letters. ‘the eldest of the brothers')  ‘You, you (in a friendly conversation)’, (letters. ‘big brother') ‘guy, bro (respectful address to the interlocutor)’, (letters. ‘younger sister') ‘little sister, girl (appeal to the interlocutor, younger in age or position’) ^{[2, p. 74]}. In addition, there is a tendency of gradual erasure of age differentiation among young people, when "relatives of descending generations do not differentiate on the basis of relative age" ^{[24, p. 79]}. 

         Given the complex social stratification of traditional Chinese society, where the primary role was played not by the status and position of an individual, but by the place occupied by his family and its authority, different "types" of families or clans stood out. Over all the Chinese people were the Emperor and his relatives denoting words / ‘Imperial relatives, members of the ruling family; belonging to the Royal family’, ‘Imperial house’, ‘relatives of the Emperor, the Royal family’, ‘the younger members of the Royal family’, ‘Golden branches and jade leaves (arr. members of the Imperial family, the people of aristocratic descent)’. Lower in status were the aristocracy, rich and powerful families: noble family; aristocracy;mouth. the Chinese, the Han people’, ‘important (noble) race’, ‘famous race’, ‘famous family; the know’, ‘sort of hereditary officials’, 'house of feudal lords (or officials); the most famous race ( ‘the family of officials’)’, 's'st. noble family; rich house; sovereign (in the mouth of relatives and confidants); sovereign’, ‘powerful house; house of an official in authority’, ‘rich and noble family’, ‘noble family’, ‘red gate (mod. in meaning: dwelling of the nobility, rich house)’, 'rich family; influential family'’ 'peren. sort merits; pedigree; eminent rod’, ‘inscriptions of ranks (on the left) and of the merits of a kind (on the right side) on the gate of the house; the know’, ‘influential house’, ‘influential house’, ‘rich and influential family’, ‘powerful family and a respected clan’, ‘aristocracy’, ‘influential family’, 'known family’, ‘wealthy family’, ‘numerous family; wealthy house; rich noble family’, ‘rich family’, ‘mouth. the richest family in the district’, ‘a rich and noble family’, ‘a middle-income family’ ^[34].

In a separate group, families whose members were engaged in intellectual work can be distinguished: ‘a family of intellectuals, a family of scientists’, ‘an intelligent family; a literary family, a clan (a family in which the traditions of writers are maintained for many generations)', 'a house where "Shi-ching" and "Li-ji" are studied; an educated and cultured family' [Ibid.]. The lowest level was occupied by families of the poor or peasants, for whom there were also many nominations:a family of low origin, a poor house; a small family’, a family of low origin; the poor’, a peasant family, a peasant family, a yard‘, a poor family; my family’, a distressed family (in need) family’, 'poor family’, 'a gate made of brushwood (meaning: poor dwelling), poor family’, 'wicker gates and matting doors (meaning: poor man's dwelling, poor house); humiliates. my house’, ‘is a door woven from straw, instead of a window ? a broken clay jug (mod. in meaning: poor .housing; being extremely poor)’, 'poor family' [Ibid.]. Of course, after the formation of the PRC in 1949, some of the tokens gradually disappeared into history along with the republican era, which in turn replaced the era of imperial China. However, some of them, for example, those belonging to wealthy and powerful clans, as well as those engaged in science or teaching, can still be found in the language now, when the Chinese people have become much richer thanks to Deng Xiaoping's reforms, and the current leadership speaks about the importance of progress and innovation in highly intelligent technologies ^[37].

For a more accurate analysis of possible shifts in the KYAKM in the idea of the family, it was decided to take not the monosyllabic jia, due to the labor intensity of its formal differentiation from the derivational suffix isomorphic to it, but not the less common binomial with a narrower meaning of the jiatin, which consists of two signs rooted in guwen fortune-telling inscriptions and inscriptions on bronze vessels and Jinwen bells, a ‘house’ and a ’courtyard; a spacious hall'.

According to dictionary definitions ^{[3; 4; 15; 27]},? is ‘family; home; hearth; home, family'.  Hanyu dacidian ^[35] interprets it as ('social unit based on marriage and blood ties, including parents, children and other relatives living together'), which is slightly wider than the definition ^[16] the "group of relatives living together (husband and wife, parents with children)". Note that only the dictionary ^[1] indicates the meaning of "childlessness" as a semantic component of the now popular phrase "small family".

To conduct a corpus analysis, we selected about 1100 phrases from the Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese (out of a total sample of 1862) and 100 examples from the corpus of Leeds University, grouping them as follows (below are only the most characteristic and interesting examples):

+ n.: ‘family life’, ‘family environment’, / ‘family meeting’, ‘domestic violence’, ‘family harmony’, ‘financial situation in the family’, ‘family conflict’, 'attachment to the family’, ‘independent family life’, ‘memory kind’, ‘difficulties of family life’, 'family crisis’, 'happy atmosphere in the family’, ‘family burden’, ‘social origin of the family’;

            Adj. /entity. + : ‘first family’, 'broken home’, family without children with both working spouses’, ‘the family, which after the departure of grown children leaving only one parents’, / ‘simple family, nuclear family’, ‘Patriarchal family’, ‘new family’, ‘little family’, ‘happy family’, ‘family of the businessman’, ‘traditional family’, 'close, close-knit family’, ‘rich and influential family’, ‘civil family’.           

     Verb. + : ‘focus on the family’, 'to destroy the family’, ‘not to maintain contact with family’, ‘take care of the family’, ‘to get another family’, 'away from home’, ‘to destroy the family relations’, ‘save the family’, ‘troubled family’, ‘destroy harmonious family’.  Below are the most frequent collocations of the lexemes "family, home" (Table. 1), clearly demonstrating the relevance and semantic content of this concept for the Chinese language consciousness. 

Table 1. Collocations of the lexeme "family, home" and their frequency of occurrence (according to the Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese)

Table 1. The collocations of the?/ ‘family, home’ lexemes and their frequency rate (based on the Balanced Chinese Language Corpora)

From the sample obtained, it can be concluded that the issue of family integrity and cohesion has been acute in Chinese society for the last two or three decades, and divorce processes and a dysfunctional family situation have an extremely negative impact on the younger generation of young people. At the same time, harmony and mutual understanding, family warmth and closeness, joint celebrations and dinners, as well as the desire to increase family income through the efforts of the whole group continue to be traditionally valued (hence the significant number of lexical units describing types of farms, as well as intra-family economic relations). Let's add that the modern realities of China lead to a rethinking of traditional concepts, when old words have new meanings, for example, the semantic neologism "to return to the parents' house" (about the bride)’ in modern Chinese has developed the meaning of  ‘return to your previous place of work, study'.

In China, as in many countries of the world, one of the obvious social problems was the late creation of a family, which was reflected in the language, for example, ‘old men and women'. Today, few people in this country officially get married or get married at the age of twenty. Modern youth strives to create a family for love, optimally already having their own living space and a permanent job. No one is in a hurry, as before, to have and raise children, but first of all tries to become independent and get away from the guardianship of parents, often moving to live in another place ^[22].

By the 21st century, shifts in Chinese perceptions of the goal of creating a family have become obvious, modern youth propagandize such atypical principles for traditional China as: "a family of two working spouses", "a DINK family, a family without children", "being burdened with a family". The ideal of a large Confucian family in the current conditions is changing to a small family, a family without children. Despite this, such matrimonial ideals as "family harmony", "family happiness" and "friendly family" continue to be cultivated in the media, especially on television. 

According to Lin Yutang, the influence of globalization can also be seen in the emancipation of Chinese girls who no longer strive to realize the Confucian ideal of a "beautiful wife and wise mother" (), i.e. a woman is not always ready to maintain harmony and peace in the family, indulging her husband in everything, as required by tradition ( 'mod. about harmony and peace in the family, the wife echoes her husband in everything’) or only give birth to children and engage in their upbringing, which also contradicts traditional views (‘becoming a mother of many children’). Previously, Chinese women were called "the one inside", that is, inside the house, which is natural, since they all had the status of "housewife", and believed that a woman's virtue was in the absence of talents () ^[13].

Since the end of the XX century, women have started talking about equality, they are showing a desire to have fewer children, who, if necessary, can be given to a permanent nanny for upbringing. Some shifts in gender roles are also indicated by such lexical neologisms as ‘nursing father’, that is, a man who runs a household and raises a child while his wife earns money, ’boy-baba', an independent, purposeful woman who has traditionally masculine qualities of character, 'a woman with a successful career, who has not yet married and is already older (from the Chinese point of view) than the ideal age for marriage’ ^{[8; 11]}. In other words, there are women who are ready either to give up childbearing altogether in favor of a personal career, or men, fearing public condemnation, do not want, as they say, “to eat soft rice” (,), i.e. to sit on the neck of a wife, to live on the support of a woman.

At the same time, there is a tendency to return to the views that existed in old China on the relationship between men and women, for example, when "among the rich and powerful, it has become good form, along with a legitimate wife, to keep the so-called ernai () (second wife, concubine), who pays for a separate apartment, her own small car and a mountain of handbags" ^{[10, p. 162; see also 28]}, or, as they also say, to arrange a beloved girl in a golden house.

From all of the above, it can be concluded that in today's society, not everyone is ready to follow the precepts of Confucius, who believed that "mutual tenderness, trust, honesty, respect should be laid at the foundation of marital relations" and that "a wife will be an ideal for her husband, and a husband is an ideal for his wife" ^{[12, pp. 319, 323]}. However, surveys ^[29] show that some respondents still believe that a wife should competently manage the household, take care of her husband, teach children and follow the Confucian principle of “threefold submission and four virtues” (), namely, be virtuous, modest in speech, feminine, hardworking and obedient. Thus, two trends coexist in China: on the one hand, there are those who adhere to traditional views on family and marital relations, and those who seek to adapt Western democratic approaches to the same issues of upbringing.

For the completeness of the contextual analysis, it is also necessary to turn to the clarification of the relevance of the economic component of the family, to financial issues affecting its security and well-being. The household, popular among Chinese peasants from the time of ancient China and before the collectivization of the XX century, in the modern conditions of globalization and the enrichment of the nation has acquired the form of a private family business:‘There is a close relationship between their business and family life’; ‘Hardworking people who invest in business and have a small family will almost certainly get rich first."   As a rule, if you know the measure and the balance, combining work and family stuff, you can fully realize their potential and be successful in both fields of activity: ‘In managing family finances, beware of putting money in the first place, as this can harm the relationship of spouses, parents and children.’; ‘More than half of people have succeeded in their careers and are happy in their family life at the same time."

Nevertheless, existing financial obligations, for example, apartment rent, utility costs, credit loans, have led to the appearance of such phenomena and, as a result, the corresponding nominations in the language, as '"half-hearted" marriage', a situation when, after registration, the newlyweds for some reason (e.g. lack of housing) do not have the opportunity to live together, ‘spouses for the weekend’, i.e. spouses forced to live apart on weekdays and meeting only on weekends, ‘naked wedding', i.e. a wedding without first buying an apartment, a car, wedding rings, without any expensive ceremonies, etc.D. ^{[9.1; 9.2; 11; 23]}.

In particular, urban youth believes that "first of all, work, income, career, apartment, car ... without this, a family is not a family, and it is impossible to give birth to a child; you need to wait, because a scientific and civilized way of life is the late birth of an only child in a financially secure family..." ^{[20, p. 54]}. Perhaps this is how they defend their personal position and resist pressure from their parents, persuading them to get married and have a child as soon as possible. In other words, the times when matchmakers resorted to mediation for marriage and sought the consent of the family have already passed, especially in large cities, where young people do not base strong family relationships on duty to their loved ones and not the need for procreation, but mutual sympathy and love, which was previously almost not mentioned in this capacity ^{[28; 30]}.

Such a position requires young Chinese people to be confident in their own rightness, to be willing to partially disregard the opinion of the family, and, as a result, the need to develop their own personal opinion and the ability to defend their position. 

Thus, our research has shown that, due to the influence of Western liberal democratic values on modern Chinese society over the past thirty years, in particular, on intra-family relations, relations between parents and children, there has been a noticeable shift in the assessment and interpretation of the concept of "family" in the Chinese language. On the one hand, under the influence of the historical events of the XX century, some designations of family groups and clans went out of use, the situation of women and the economic situation in the country as a whole changed, which also led to the emergence of numerous new neologisms fixing these extralinguistic transformations. On the other hand, the older generation and the leadership of the CPC continue to promote the traditional approach to family values, which also illustrates the language material of the corpora. It remains for us to observe how the planned vector of development of the Chinese language picture of the world will strive to synthesize Western and traditional Chinese views further.