The category "friend - stranger" has a universal character and is considered in different aspects and in the context of different humanitarian disciplines. In addition to philosophy, psycholinguistics and sociology, they include linguistics, which studies this category in the functional aspect.The work is carried out in the framework of functional grammar, relying on the basic terms such as function, environment, semantic category (functional-semantic category). The specifics of functional grammar is manifested in its focus on revealing the features of interaction between grammatical units, the context, the system of functioning of language tools, which serve to convey the meaning of the utterance. It is within the framework of functional grammar, the category "his own - alien" is seen as a semantic category, and it is in it we study language units in a particular environment - the set of language elements that play the role of environment for the original system. By interacting with them, the original system can be interpreted and perform its functions in different ways. In our case, the environment is V. S. Vysotsky's poetic texts, in which the category "our own - alien" functions.