Linguistic cultureme chevalier as the object of semiometric analysis

In the article an attempt to realize a semiometric analyses of the lexeme «chevalier», which is the key notion in European medieval discourse, is made. In this regard, the lexeme chevalier is perceived as a linguistic cultureme that represents the most valuable social and cultural categories of High Middle Ages. Special attention is paid to validating the efficiency of the semiomerty as one of the special types of linguistics axiological analyses in diachronic research. The suggested overview is based on the results of etymological and semantic analyses of the kernel lexemes as well as on contextual analysis of the collocations. We prove the hypothesis that the lexeme under consideration becomes «the word of civilization», that represents some moral and esthetical ideals of the Middle Ages society which are related to the perception of masculine identity. The results of this research make it possible to partly reconstruct the system of anthropological values, associated with a particular status of a man in the period of feudal Christian Medieval Europe.