Lexical semantic fields чувство and le sentiment in the comparative linguocultural aspect

The article touches the problem of the definition volume of lexical semantic field and the hierarchy between the notions of the semantic field, lexical semantic field and lexical semantic group that are defined differently by the linguists nowadays. It was pointed that lexical semantic field (LSF) is a group of lexemes which are combined on the basis of the common seme and represent the same part of speech (in this article the fields consist of nouns only). We analyzed the structure and the contents of the two fields in Russian and French and compared them basing on three different types of structuring: the one based on the scientific (linguistic) worldview, the type based on the naïve worldview and the «core - periphery» type of structuring. In addition, the original feelings’ classification was used as a basis for the first type of the field structuring. The objective of this research is to compare two fields which are чувство in Russian (100 lexemes) and le sentiment in French (146 lexemes). Here we can note that the French LSF is 1,5 times larger than the Russian one which can be explained by the fact that there are actually more different words of various styles and application domains in French denominating feelings and that some of the words nominating feelings in French and having explicitly this particular seme in the definition don’t have this seme in the analogous words’ definitions in Russian. Having analyzed the fields by three types of structuring we obtained the following results. It is known that the French language is more abstract than Russian and that it has more different styled lexemes that name feelings such as philosophic, psychoanalytic, didactic and religious notions. We also discovered that there are two times more lexemes for undirected feelings in French than in Russian one of the reasons for which is the opposition ‘private / collective feelings’ represented in the definitions of French lexemes and absent in the Russian field. One of the few common features of the fields is the same distribution of words in the lexical semantic groups in terms of percentage.