A study on the language of the Golden Age is the object of study of this book written by the UGR Professor Francisca Medina Morales, under the title: “The language of the Golden Age. A linguistic variation study”, published by the Universidad de Granada Press in the collection “Biblioteca de Humanidades/ Filología Lingüística”, supervised by Professor Dolores Ferre Cano.
This 350 page book has been published by the Universidad de Granada Press, in which the author has considered from the sociolinguistic analysis and the picaresque novel to the main phonetic-phonologic and morphological questions or the main syntactic constructions.
According to the UGR Professor, the volume has been conceived from a variationist perspective, given that the Spanish of the Golden Age represents in the history of the Spanish language, above all, a period of important changes. “We knew -says Francisca Medina- that we were not dealing with a homogeneous object of study: there is not a linguistic unity in the Spanish of the 16th and 17th century. To the contrary, the language disintigrated into several fronts: on the one hand, certain medieval and modern variants coexisted in harmony through a conciliatory speaker, perpetuating a stable variation, as they were used by the community for a long time, whereas other variants struggled to obtain the desired longed-for title of ´prestigious forms´ ousting their opponents”.
On the other hand, always according to the author of the book, at this period they had nor solved yet the so-called `language problem` or the supremacy of a linguistic norm elevated to a standard, this is, the model for linguistic correctness had not been defined yet.
“In such a way that-says Francisca Medina- we have several conflicting standards: the Castilian, the Toledan and the Andalusian; and, simultaneously, we admit that the prescriptions of the grammarians can be based on the authority or on the use criterion, two criteria which depend, to a great extent, on the sense conferred by each grammarian to these terms”.
Reference: Professor Francisca Medina Morales Department of Spanish Language.
Universidad de Granada
Phone numbers: 958 249 077 / 958 246 394.
E-mail: fmedina@ugr.es
