The Analysis of the Middle English Concept Dwelling through Language Means and Artifacts: the Rural Manor

This paper considers verbal and non-verbal manifestations of the Middle English concept dwelling, and posits that the characteristic features of the Medieval dwelling, as well as people's conceptual vision of the world of physical reality are reflected in the language units employed to name these artifacts. The linguistic analyses of the concept manifestants are performed within the framework of an interpretation field, which enables one to map the mental structure of this concept. With the rural manor being in the centre of this study, the authors theorize that the conceptual picture of dwelling is faceted, and moulded by nuclear cognitive features. These core features embrace nominative and nonderivative meanings of the key words behind this concept, i. e. house, dwellinge, hom 'building / construction / structure for people / animals to live in'. The lexical units manifesting any of these features in their semantics account for the nuclear part of the field. The cluster of the nuclear features of the concept rests stable for different speakers across a selected social group, while other lexis constituents of the field are classed in various sense-groups with one or more central cognitive feature/s for each group. The list of such cognitive features and, accordingly, of the sense-groups retrieved in the course of the cognitive analysis performed is not definitive, but to a certain degree may mirror the way the medieval English speaker could picture the concept of dwelling. The focus on the medieval dwelling as a subject of the study has a linguistic background: the authors failed to trace any strong juxtaposition of the features constituting rural / urban dwellings in the period, and thus, of the words naming them, which can be partly explained by the agriculture-based economy of the England of the 10 ^th-11 ^th cc. AD, and the late emergence of urban areas. At the same time, language means alone cannot be the only object of such concept studies: integrated analyses of lexical means together with such non-verbal phenomena as architectural monuments of the Medieval Britain between the 11^th and 14^th cc. BC, and other artifacts make it possible to build a more or less complete picture of the Medieval dwelling. Another key aspect of the question under discussion is the assumption that there is a strong correlation between the appearance of a dwelling place and its structure / function on the development of the semantic structure of the Middle English polysemantic words associated with the medieval abode.

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