The Semantic Legacy of the Medieval World: Words Denoting Social Ranks in English and French
The Semantic Legacy of the Medieval World: Words Denoting Social Ranks in English and French

Summary/Abstract: Social ranks terms are categories which exhibit a distinct lexical structure than other categories (natural, artifacts), due to the specificity of the classes of objects they denote. They can be identified and described according to a set of criterial features proposed by Dahlgren (1985): physical appearance, social function, social relations, internal attributes and cultural stereotypes. These features prove the constitutive character of social terms, which accounts for the emergence and functioning of a social category within an institution with its specific rules (Dahlgren 1985). In the case of the studied words, the institution is the medieval society with its rigid social stratification. The constitutive nature of English and French social rank terms will be revealed in this paper by a socio-historical account of the main events which brought about changes in both vocabularies and by a detailed etymological analysis of the structure of the studied words.

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