The middle English concept “dwelling” and its manifestations through language means and artifacts: city dwellings, castle complex

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.