THE MIDDLE ENGLISH CONCEPT “DWELLING” AND ITS MANIFESTATIONS THROUGH LANGUAGE MEANS AND ARTIFACTS: CITY DWELLINGS, CASTLE COMPLEX

Abstract

The paper considers the Middle English concept DWELLING represented by both language means
and artifacts and focuses on city dwellings and castles. The linguistic analyses of the concept manifestants
is realised in the frames of its interpretation field, which enables us to get an idea of the concept
structure. However, language means alone cannot be relied on in case of the concept studies; integrated
analyses of lexical means together with non-verbal phenomena, like architectural momuments of Medieval
Britain (XI–XIV), their reconstructed pictures or other artifacts makes it possible to build a complete
picture of Medieval dwelling.
The characteristic features of the Medieval dwelling as well as people’s ideas about the world of
physical reality turn out to be reflected in the language. Another key aspect of the question under discussion
is an assumption about the influence of the appearance of a dwelling place and its structure on
the development of the semantic structure of Middle English polysemantic words.