The following article focuses on semantical differences of verbal-nominal descriptive predicates constructed by verbs ispytyvat’ / ispytat’ from their lexically adequate verbal correlates. The Russian linguistic tradition describes such col-locations as verbal periphrasis, and this leads to a misjudgment of their semantical particularity. Our main goal is to describe the differences due to state semantical independence of the collocations from the verbs.The study showed that an emotional state described by descriptive predicates with verbs ispytyvat’ / ispytat’ presupposes no explication, which differs them from some lexically adequate verbal correlates. It reveals an intra-subject nature of their semantics that can be manifested in a specific actant structure or in its implementation. It is also worth noting their semantic complexity and an important role of verbal component: different meanings of the verbal component cause different semantics of whole collocation even with the same nominal one. Thus, particular meaning of a nominal component and of a verbal one makes up semantics of a whole construction.Many types and examples of semantical discrepancy between the verbal-nominal descriptive predicates and their lexically adequate verbal correlates leads to the necessity of describing their semantics departed from the verbal correlates’ meaning and of the refusal to consider them as means of verbal periphrasis.