The volume contains a selection of the papers given at an international conference organized in 1995 on the application of new theories and description methods to the lexicological analysis and lexicographic description of the Romance languages, with special reference to French and Italian. Central subjects are: the fine-honing and reformulation of the structuralist approach to the analysis of semantic features in the light of more recent developments and approaches (cognitive semantics, frames and scenes, stereotype semantics); the semantics of morphologically complex words; the syntactic aspects of the lexicon (modern versions of valency theory, lexical-functional grammar); and the role of the computer in the ongoing development of methods of analysis and description of semantic and syntactic structures of the lexicon in lexicography and elsewhere.

The articles in this volume are revised versions of papers presented at an international colloquium in Munich in 2001. With special reference to French, the authors attempt a cognitive interpretation of language features and texts from a decidedly historical viewpoint. Implicit in the project is the hope that 'cognitive history' will be able to establish itself as a third approach alongside external history (largely event-based) and internal history (derived from the structuralist model). Among the topics addressed are schematization, conceptualization, lexical variation, and enunciation.

The 'profile' of a word is understood here as the totality of the semantic, combinatory, and grammatical features determining its specific communicative potential. The book provides profiles of well over 100 French nouns and verbs, thus supplying new foundations for the distinction of synonyms, the differentiation of subordinate meanings, and the etymology of the words in question. The study draws upon large-scale electronic corpora (modern novels, newspapers). The purpose of this approach is to demonstrate that the typical collocations encountered in everyday usage can be explained with reference to deeper semantic and cognitive structures.

The comparison of mother tongue and target language has, for a long time, created a bridge between the practical and the academic work in language in German university studies. This course book is an introduction to this central area of philological study for German speaking students of French and French speaking students of German. It also enables a familiarization with the state of today's research.

Quels sont, de nos jours, les principaux objectifs et les methodes novatrices en matiere d'histoire de la langue francaise ? Comment concevoir les relations entre linguistique diachronique, histoire de la langue et sociolinguistique historique ? Dans quelle mesure convient-il de remettre en question l'opposition traditionnelle entre facteurs de changement linguistique internes et externes a la langue ? Faut-il etre a la fois historien et linguiste pour faire de l'histoire de la langue ? C'est a ces questions que le volume tente de repondre, en mettant en relief, d'une part, les innovations methodologiques liees a la linguistique de corpus, en insistant, d'autre part, sur le role de certains phenomenes societaux, dont la pertinence pour l'evolution linguistique parait probable.