Abstract
The article discusses the features of the use of verbs of visual perception, in particular, the verb ‘любоваться’ {lyubovat’sya}, in Russian and English. In order to identify the specifics of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations of this lexeme with adjacent linguistic units, to determine its place in the structure of the semantic field "visual perception of an object", a study of its semantic content, pragmatic functions determined by the author's intentions, features of contextual use and participation in the formation of figurative language tools was carried out. As a result of the study, we came to the conclusion that the specific use of the verb under consideration is due to the syncretism of its grammatical functions, which include: the nomination of the process, the characteristics of the relationship between the participants in the situation, and the expression of the axiological assessment of both the object and the subject of visual perception. The representativeness of the study is provided by examples from the texts of classical literature of different time periods. Illustrative examples are taken from the National Corpus of the Russian Language [https://ruscorpora.ru] and the Corpus of Contemporary American English [https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/].