Language standardization is an ongoing process based on the notions of linguistic correctness and models. This manual contains thirty-six chapters that deal with the theories of linguistic norms and give a comprehensive up-to-date description and analysis of the standardization processes in the Romance languages. The first section presents the essential approaches to the concept of linguistic norm ranging from antiquity to the present, and includes individual chapters on the notion of linguistic norms and correctness in classical grammar and rhetoric, in the Prague School, in the linguistic theory of Eugenio Coseriu, in sociolinguistics as well as in pragmatics, cognitive and discourse linguistics. The second section focuses on the application of these notions with respect to the Romance languages. It examines in detail the normative grammar and the normative dictionary as the reference tools for language codification and modernization of those languages that have a long and well-established written tradition, i.e. Romanian, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese. Furthermore, the volume offers a discussion of the key issues regarding the standardization of the 'minor' Romance languages as well as Creoles.

In the Middle Ages, Boethiusa (TM) a oeConsolatio Philosophiaea is one of the most influential philosophical works from Late Antiquity. It was frequently commented on and translated. This collected volume examines the commentaries and translations of the famous text from a European perspective and thus paves the way for interdisciplinary research into the medieval reception of Boethiusa (TM) work. The volume contains chapters by linguists and literary scholars from a variety of disciplines, together with historians and philosophers.

In the study of modern languages at universities, philology understood in the narrower sense of textual criticism has become such a specialized activity that for a long time it generated only very few methodological impulses of broader relevance to the subjects and disciplines in which it was practised. This state of affairs changed dramatically with the advent of the so-called 'New Philology' in the early 90s, an approach relating textual criticism to text theory and text history. The volume assembles the findings of an international colloquium held at the University of Jena (19 Oct. to 21 Oct. 1995), at which linguists, literary scholars and specialists in Romance and German Studies subjected the theories of this 'New Philology' to a critical review, the overall objective being to revive the dialogue between the relevant disciplines and sub-disciplines.

Taking their bearings from the Prague School of linguistics, these studies define 'language culture' as the efforts undertaken by institutions and individuals to preserve or improve an existing system of verbal communication within a language, in this case standard Spanish. They examine the status, forms and functions of Spanish language culture, placing it first of all within the broader European context and pointing up the unique way in which it combines the traditional with the innovative. In so doing, they provide an invaluable source of knowledge regarding the modernization processes that standard Spanish is subject to and its status within Europe as a whole. As such the studies also represent a touchstone for and potential dialogue with research into language varieties, as these can only be described in the way they compare and contrast with the architecture of standard Spanish.

Recent developments of linguistics have given innovative impulses to historical semantics. For the Romance study of words, the time has come to establish a dialogue between theorists and historians of language. As far as structural semantics are integrated into cognitive concepts of historical semantics, it remains attractive for the lexical analysis of older language levels and relevant for the linguistics of semantic change/change in meaning. Cognitive models are undergoing new accentuations towards a pragmatic historical semantics, which are open to/receptive to language-historical questions in particular.