The concept HOUSE in Penelope Lively’s The House in Norham Gardens

Abstract

In this paper, the verbalization of one of the key concepts in the English sphere of concepts, HOUSE, in P. Lively’s novel The House in Norham Gardens is analysed. The research is based on a three-layer model of a concept developed by V. I. Karasik, as well as the method of linguo-conceptual analysis which involves the following steps: 1) definition and etymological analysis of the lexeme house; 2) analysis of the lexical and phraseological units representing the concept in the language, 3) contextual analysis of the corpus of contexts in which the lexeme house is used. The traditional, “cultural”, verbalization of the HOUSE is compared with the author’s individual one, which is derived through a similar analysis of the author’s contexts. In the novel, a certain extension in the meaning of the core components is traced — the concept HOUSE acquires the basic features of the concept HOME. The method of linguo-conceptual analysis allows us to reveal the variety of images connected with the idea of the house. The metaphorical models “the house is a museum”, “the house is life”, “the house is a dinosaur/monster” employed by the author add to the conceptualization of the house as a major value of English culture. This concept is based on the archaic understanding of the house as “one’s own”, internal, mastered space, which confronts the strange, external space of chaos. The analysis allows us to assume that the procedure of the linguoconceptual analysis of the individual author’s concepts opens up prospects for further study of the individual author’s concepts in modern English literature, followed by a comparative study in the intercultural dimension.