The article reports the results of a contrastive analysis of semantic structures of lexical units nominating emotions in Slavic (Russian), Germanic (English), Romanic (French and Italian) linguocultures. The main goal of this study is to elicit similarities and differences of the selected lexis due to specificity of the national culture and peculiarities of semantic and grammatical systems of the languages in question. As linguistic material the author uses lexical units nominating types of emotional states and occurring in the definitions of the word “emotion” in modern linguistic, psychological and philosophical dictionaries: emotion, anger, depression, sadness, joy, suffering, passion, anguish, astonishment, despondency. This article covers the results obtained from the analysis of the words anger, joy, astonishment. The author applied methods of linguistic observation and description (in order to select the lexis and to describe its characteristics systematically), the method of definitions (to define the semantics of the analyzed lexical units), the method of comparative analysis (to identify similarities and differences among different lexemes), the method of reversibility (to elicit the equivalence of terms belonging to different languages). According to the results of the analysis, the author describes the importance of these emotions in each culture, determines the degree of equivalence between English - Russian, French - Russian, Italian - Russian lexemes, notes the cases of homonymy, polysemy, synonymy and identifies the latent associative semantic linkage.

anthropocentrism, emotiology, emotion, emotional state, anger, astonishment, joy, the method of reversibility