Russian dialectal lexemes of the semantic field of «MADNESS»

The article analyzes the Russian dialectal words and word combinations belonging to the semantic field of «MADNESS», understood as an open structure. We single out types of primary motivation, according to which madness characterizes the qualities of a person as a whole. We investigated the productivity and the relevance of dialectal motivational models. Some of them represent very ancient ideas about madness. The findings enable us to reconstruct a significant fragment of the world picture associated with the ideas of man.