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Cultural conceptualization of death in religious and carnival worldviews in Middle English

Paper · 2025 · Iryna Shevchenko and Iryna Morozova

Summary

The paper looks at how the concept of DEATH was understood in late medieval and early modern English culture. It contrasts two worldviews that existed side by side: an official religious and moral outlook shaped by Catholic doctrine, and the carnival outlook described by Bakhtin. The data come from works of literature written between the 14th and 17th centuries, chiefly Chaucer for the religious side and Shakespeare's comedies, especially A Midsummer Night's Dream, for the carnival side. The authors use Cultural Linguistics, which treats language as a store of culture-bound cognition. They combine onomasiological analysis with componential analysis, breaking death-related words into semes and archesemes, and then interpret passages to extract cultural schemas. In the religious outlook, death appears as natural, divinely ordained, and morally levelling, and people meet it with acceptance. In the carnival outlook, death is grotesque, theatrical, and laughable. Some schemas appear in both outlooks but carry opposite evaluations. The study argues that diachronic, culture-sensitive analysis can show how attitudes to a universal concept change.

Key points

  • The corpus consists of English works of literature written between the 14th and 17th centuries. Chaucer represents the moral/religious worldview, and Shakespeare's comedies represent the carnival worldview.
  • The method has three stages:
    • establish how medieval people perceived death;
    • identify cultural schemas, using componential analysis (semes and archesemes) of the lexemes that name DEATH;
    • trace how the concept was re-conceptualized across the two frameworks.
  • Schemas found only in the religious worldview: DEATH IS NATURAL TERMINAL, DIVINE PREORDINATION, THIEF, RELIEF, and REST.
  • Schemas found only in the carnival worldview: DEATH IS OBJECT OF RIDICULE, THEATRICAL PERFORMANCE, GROTESQUE BODY, and PART OF FESTIVE RENEWAL.
  • Two schemas are shared by both worldviews with opposite evaluations: DEATH IS SOCIAL EQUALIZER (respected in one, treated irreverently in the other) and DEATH IS UNDISCOVERED TERRITORY (feared in one, mocked in the other).
  • The authors name two limitations: psycholinguistic methods could not be applied to historical texts, and later periods (Enlightenment, Romantic, contemporary) remain future work.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The same conceptual schema can carry opposite evaluative stances depending on the framework, such as reverence versus mockery of death as an equalizer, so the schema and the attitude toward it should be stored separately.
  • I2. Componential analysis breaks each word that names a concept into minimal distinctive features (semes) and groups them into archesemes, which gives an explicit and inspectable basis for grouping near-synonyms.
  • I3. Genre or worldview acts as a condition on interpretation: in a comedy's play-within-a-play, a character's "death" is a staged performance, not a real event.
  • I4. The Demetrius pun treats "die" as a single die from a set of dice, showing how comic texts exploit the ambiguity between a verb and a noun lemma.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): Irony detection in prag could attach a separate stance layer to a recognized frame, so a parodic death scene keeps its death frame but is flagged as mocking rather than solemn.
  • I2 (world): Death-related verbs and nouns in the ontology could carry seme-like feature sets (for example, cause, agent, finality), so that equivalences between lexemes are explainable instead of resting on embedding similarity.
  • I3 (world): When building the world of a text, events inside embedded performances or parody could go into a separate fictional layer, so a staged death does not change the state of the entity in the main story.
  • I4 (tokens): The tagger and lemmatizer could keep both readings of a homograph like "die" available when the context signals wordplay, rather than committing early to one, and pass the ambiguity on to the irony stage.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Also on the byline: V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksSocial Sciences · 1,772 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 870 worksAnthropology · 11 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 249 works

Cite

Cite as Iryna Shevchenko and Iryna Morozova. 2025. Cultural conceptualization of death in religious and carnival worldviews in Middle English. East European Journal of Psycholinguistics 12.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.29038/eejpl.2025.12.1.she

@article{shevchenko2025cultural,
  title = {{Cultural conceptualization of death in religious and carnival worldviews in Middle English}},
  author = {Iryna Shevchenko and Iryna Morozova},
  journal = {East European Journal of Psycholinguistics 12},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.29038/eejpl.2025.12.1.she},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.29038/eejpl.2025.12.1.she}
}

References

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