Актуализация концепта “Home” через понятийные лексемы в английской культуре Позднего Средневековья

Abstract

The article deals with the study of the relevance of the concept “Home” as an integral part of the daily communication of English people during the Late Middle Ages. The purpose of the article is the etymological analysis of the concept and its nominee — “home” and “house”, as well as highlighting the key conceptual lexemes, which formed fixed combinations with the concept in the 14th and 15th centuries. In the study, the authors used descriptive and comparative-historical methods in a diachronic approach. According to A. Jucker’s theory of “Collective Characteristics of the Concept”, each historical period includes a set of concepts capable of revealing both the social structure and the linguistic norms of the culture studied. This confirms the practical significance of the study: by revealing one of the most significant concepts of medieval society, it is possible to immerse deeper into its customs and informal laws. The authors have examined the etymology of the concept on the basis of ancient English, ancient German and Gothic languages. Thanks to this, it is possible to establish the cultural and linguistic field of the concept. The concept “home’’ includes lexemes of figurative, conceptual and value aspects, but it is conceptual that allows, even with a severe lack of material, to observe the verbalization of the concept. By producing an analysis of “home” and “house” based on Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries, the modern meaning of words has been identified. Next, the lexemes applied to the concept in the 14th and 15th centuries, namely, nouns, verbs, and adjectives have been examined and the significance of the diachronic approach to the study of language concepts was confirmed. The study was supported by examples from A. Jucker’s medieval legal and artistic works — “The History of English language and English Historical Lin-guistics” and J. Firbas’ — “On Defining a Theme in Functional Analysis of Proposals”. The perspective of the study is to make a comparison between all concepts in the English culture of the Late Middle Ages and to fully disclose the social dynamics of this historical period.