Structural and semantic characteristics of "Madness" microfield in modern English

The integrated structural and semantic description of phraseological units is of great interest in modern linguistics. This article represents some results of structural and semantic analysis of phraseological units which reflect the notion of madness in the English language. The subject of the research is represented by structural and semantic aspects of the studied units. English phraseological units were selected from monolingual and bilingual dictionaries with the help of continuous sampling method. The presence of components, characterizing madness, such as mad, crazy, insane lexemes in units or their definitions was the selection criterion. This helped us to identify the microfield of "Madness". This microfield in its turn is a part of a phraseosemantic field "Human intellectual abilities". Structural and semantic analysis of this microfield's phraseological units has been carried out. Detailed component analysis of these units and their definitions allowed us to define phraseosemantic groups, which constitute microfield "Madness". They are "Intellectual Deviation", "Mental Deviation", "Behavior Deviation". Within the phrasesemantic group "Mental Deviation", we have defined units belonging to subgroups "A Mad Person" and "Coming into Madness". Speaking about structural characteristics of phraseological units of microfield "Madness", we have concluded that most of them are verbal combinations. These verbs define movement in relation to some point: intellectual, medical and behavioral norm.