Lexical-semantic group in contrastive analysis based on the material of Ukrainian, English, and German languages

Cross-linguistic research on lexical-semantic groups (LSGs) often remains predominantly qualitative and fragmented, which makes it difficult to compare universal and culture-specific patterns across languages in a systematic way. This study examines four LSGs emotions, colours, verbs of motion, and kinship terms in Ukrainian, English, and German in order to clarify how their core and periphery are structured in contemporary language use. Conceptually, the study is situated within cognitive semantics and prototype theory, treating core–periphery structure as a frequency-based approximation of shared prototypes and peripheral extensions. The empirical basis consists of a questionnaire survey of 300 respondents (100 per language group), combining frequency ratings with choices among near-synonymous items. Quantitative analysis (core ≥ 75% of respondents) is complemented by qualitative interpretation of polysemy and cultural associations. The results show that in the emotional domain Ukrainians most frequently actualize радість ‘joy’, whereas English and German speakers foreground negative emotions such as anger/Ärger and fear/Angst. In the colour group, a shared core is formed by red, blue, and green, with minor differences in the salience of yellow. For verbs of motion, йти/go/gehen constitutes a universal core, while English and German display higher frequencies of transport-related verbs (ride/fahren). Kinship terms (mother, father, brother, sister) form the most stable core across all three languages. Overall, the study demonstrates how LSGs simultaneously reflect universal cognitive categories and culturally conditioned profiles of salience and contributes to cognitive and contrastive semantics by offering an empirically grounded, frequency-based core–periphery model with applications for contrastive semantics, translation, and intercultural language pedagogy.