Sensorics of the category of physiological and mental deviations in English drolls

The paper deals with sensory means of the expression within the semantic fields of the category of physiological and mental deviations in English old drolls. The source of material is folklore texts by T. Blount, W.C. Hazlitt, E.S. Hartland, G. Stephens, T. Sternerg, T. Wright, Ch. S. Burne, J. Jacobs. The semantic and contextual analyses of the sensory lexemes, collocations, phraseological units representing the semantic fields that form the category under study were considered as the main research methods. The semantic analysis showed that linguosensory lexical units in the folklore texts actualize different areas of semantic fields that reflect social views about physiological and mental deviations. It has been defined that the structure of such fields implies a core, consisting of lexical units of a neutral-bookish style, the near periphery, including the lexis of informal style with further differentiation, and the interpretative field. The distant periphery in the structure of these fields was not formed. The semantic features of the category of physiological and mental deviations defined in the boundaries of the contextual analysis is comprise into the semantic field of the dicteme as a result of the contextual analysis of lexical units. The material and findings of the study can be used to pursue the contrastive and comparative analyses of perceptional linguistic means in the boundaries of cognitive linguistics, linguosensorics.