  Even though Boethius, in line with the Aristotelian writings he commented on, focuses on the concept of linguistic signification and hardly ever explicitly speaks of signs (notae) in general (Magee 1989, 61ff.), he is, besides Augustine, the main source for medieval theories of signs. This is explained by the fact that, due to Augustine's influence, the semantics of linguistic signs became the focus of semiotic theory, and that Boethius with his translations of and comments on parts of the Aristotelian Organon (especially Peri Hermeneias) is the most important, and for a long time the only available, source for medieval acquaintance with the semantics of Aristotle and his Neoplatonic commentators of late antiquity. Thus, the medieval philosophers viewed Aristotle's logic at first through the eyes of Boethius, who has made some influential decisions concerning semantic terminology (Engels 1963), as well as the interpretation of the Aristotelian text. What they learned through his writings were inter alia the insight into the conventional character of language, the view that meaning is established by an act of ‘imposition’, i.e., name-giving or reference-setting, and the influential idea that to signify (significare) is to “establish an understanding” (intellectum constituere).  