Lexical-Semantic Analysis of the Concept Peur (Fear) in the French Language

The field of romance philology has yet to explore the emotional concept of fear in the French language. This article aims to examine the specification, synonymy series, lexical gradations, and semantic differences of lexical and phraseological units associated with fear in French. Ultimately, this study will help define and interpret the linguistic-pragmatic and linguisticcultural aspects of the concept of fear in French.
The article presents a study on the French language’s lexical-semantic field related to the concept of “peur/fear”. The study selected and classified the lexical units of this field using distributive and component analysis methods. The lexemes were divided into groups based on their semantics and then interpreted in a table according to their semantic features. Additionally, the study analyzed the function, semantic structure, and number category of the nouns of the Peur concept in a sentence. It also explored how these nouns combine with other nouns, adjectives, and verbs using prepositions. The study confirmed the interdependence of the nuances of the meaning of the word and the cases of its use. The concept nouns related to fear have a complex semantic structure with semantic components of different levels of generality. They may also have correlations with units of other emotions or can be isolated and generalized. Based on these cases, the study divided the number of words that are close in meaning into synonymous subgroups and revealed the specific characteristics of individual units.
In conclusion, it can be observed that fear is often associated with hatred in certain situations. The nouns that are commonly used to describe this concept do not inherently have a positive or negative connotation, but the synonyms and expressions that are synonymous with “peur” (the French word for fear) tend to have a negative connotation. This situation can be seen in several derivative nouns, such as “pétoche” and “copeaux”, as well as in the words used to describe a person who has experienced fear, such as “lâche” and “couard”, or someone who contributes to the spread of fear, like “panicard” and “alarmiste”. Therefore, the analysis of various linguistic tools, including lexical, morphologicalsyntactic, functional-semantic, and stylisticpoetic tools, has scientifically and theoretically proven that the expression of fear in the French language and culture is unique.