Principles of semantic analysis of “Serval” military event field

The article is devoted to the study of “Serval” military event semantic field. This incident was widely covered in French media, however, it was positioned as an operation, a war, an intervention, an offensive etc. Taking into account the fact that the structure of semantic field can vary in different sources, this article considers in detail particular lexical units that represent the event on material of the oldest daily French newspaper “Le Figaro”. We compiled a corpus and analyzed it using the Sketch Engine program. Applying this tool, a list of lexical unit was created and analyzed. From this list we selected the units that represent “Serval” military event. Then we studied contextual use of lexical units, compiled a lexical-semantic group and identified an archiseme. The study of semantic field components was conducted using component analysis that is understood as a research method of the semantics of lexical units. Its purpose is to decompose the meaning into minimal semantic elements. The LSP dictionaries devoted to military affairs, political science, law, etc. were analyzed in this study. Based on the material of the dictionaries, the scheme of a military event is presented. It includes the following components of meaning: form, characteristic, means, cause, purpose and scale. The lexical units analysis was carried out according to the scheme. Then the hyperonym of the lexical-semantic group was determined, the components of the lexical units meaning were analyzed and semantic features were identified. This article discusses the principles of semantic field analysis and studies the semantic core of the most frequent lexical units.