The thesis is devoted to the comparative study of phraseological units indicating the action and state intensity in languages with different structures: Germanic (English, German) and Slavic (Ukrainian, Russian). The specificity of the category of intensity is manifested in its close interaction and dependence on such categories as quantity, quality, graduality, expressiveness, emotionality, imagery, assessment. In the paper, intensity is defined as a certain degree of the actions and states properties expression, the quantitative change of which occurs within a certain quality with a deviation from the norm (reference point) in the direction of their increase or decrease. It is established that the majority of the units under study (98%) are phraseological units which denote a reinforced manifestation of the intensive action and state. To distinguish phraseological units which denote the action intensity the following general characteristics are involved: agency, activity, and dynamism; for phraseological units which denote the state intensity those are nonagency, passivity, and static. These differential features, which are used for the taxonomy of the predicate vocabulary, are transferred onto the phraseological material analysed in the paper, because the phraseological units are means of secondary nomination and in functional-grammatical terms they correlate with certain parts of the speech (nouns, adjectives, verbs) and perform certain syntactic functions. Among the phraseological units with semantics of the action intensity 6 phrasesemantic groups indicating the intensity are distinguished: 1) intellectual activity; 2) physical actions; 3) activities (social, labor); 4) speech actions and sounds; 5) physiological actions; 6) motion. Phraseological units with the semantics of the state intensity are divided into 4 phrase-semantic groups indicating the intensity: 1) positive psycho-emotional state; 2) negative psycho-emotional state; 3) physiological state; 4) the course (manifestation) of natural phenomena. The paper proposes two-stage semantic analysis: 1) the analysis of the dictionary definition of phraseological unit; 2) the analysis of the formal structure of the phraseological unit. At the first stage, in order to identify the seme of the action and state intensity in the phraseological unit, the methodology of analysing the dictionary definitions and the component analysis method are used, on the basis of which components-intensifiers are distinguished, i.e. word-markers that signal at the high (extreme) degree of an action or a state. At the second stage of the analysis, a set of formal explicit (word-building, lexical-grammatical, syntactic) means of expressing the action and state intensity is established. This consideration of phraseological units allows to reveal the mechanisms of systemic and complex interaction of multilevel linguistic means which take direct part in the formation of the action and state intensity. In phraseological units under analysis, intensity can be expressed explicitly (by different linguistic means in the formal structure of the phraseological units) or implicitly (encoded in dictionary definitions of the phraseological units, their internal form, etc.). The implicit way of expressing the intensity in the analysed phraseological units is represented by: a) adverbs with the intensifying meaning (“intensifiers”) (the most frequent in the comparable languages are: Eng. very, extremely, greatly; Ger. sehr, heftig, auserst; Rus. очень, сильно; Ukr. дуже, сильно ); b) components with hidden semantics of intensity (“intensitives”), distinguished through additional lexicographic definition of the component part in the interpretation of the phraseological unit; c) the internal form of the phraseological unit. The explicit expression of the action and state intensity is represented in the structure of the phraseological units by the following linguistic means: a) word-building (prefixes, semi-prefixes); b) lexical-grammatical (adjectives in the attributive function, words-antonyms, reflexive verbs, verbs of destruction, prepositional-noun sets, pronouns, particles with the intensifying meaning); c) syntactic (comparative constructions, lexical repetition). To represent the semantics of the phraseological units, which denote the action and state intensity, the method of their semantic structure modelling is used, aimed at identifying the meaningful connections between the participants in the phraseological situation. For this purpose, standard formulas of interpretation are created, which includ the following semantic components (the participants of the phraseological situation): the subject of the action or state (X), the object of the action or state (Y), the state of the subject / object (Cond.), which in its nature can be psycho-emotional (negative (Cond neg ) or positive (Cond pos )), physiological (Cond phys ), the action of the subject / object (V), and the location (Loc.) of the subject / object. The formula of interpretation reflects a certain standard extralingual situation, which can correspond to numerous specific phraseological units in the language.