The present volume is the result of a project which concentrated on a selected subset of linguistic knowledge with the aim of giving a systematic account of the various aspects of structure and process in this subset and the interpretation of these. The subset that for a number of reasons appeared appropriate to this undertaking centres around the dimensional adjectives of German. That the en terprise ultimately produced a less integrated and complete result than expected is due to several reasons. Some of these are of an intrinsic nature, ever present, and not particularly surprising. Some, however, are related to the character of the project itself and are worth commenting upon, as they reflect specific expe riences and difficulties which we encountered during several years of working on the project. We started from the assumption that the dimensional adjectives constitute a sufficiently rich, but nevertheless limited domain of grammatical and concep tual structure which is fairly well understood and explored in relevant aspects. Consequently we expected that summarizing, integrating, and extending the nu merous results that were available should quickly lead to a more complete picture of the interaction of the components involved. However, even had the premise of this assumption been correct, the conclusion turned out to be wrong fairly early in the project. On closer inspection, the investigations of the phenomena were much less complete, the facts agreed upon less systematic, and the proposed anal yses far less convincing than supposed initially."

Die strukturelle Krise der Vollbeschaftigungsgesellschaft nimmt dem Verstandnis der Arbeit als zentralem Moment der Lebensplanung und als selbstverstandlichem Grundwert der Gesellschaft die uberkommene Selbstverstandlichkeit. Diesen ebenso offensichtlichen wie einschneidenden Befund hat die geisteswissenschaftliche Klasse der BBAW zum Anlass genommen, in einer Reihe von Vortragen das Konzept der Arbeit und ihre Rolle in verschiedenen Kulturen und wechselnden historischen Perioden zum Thema zu machen, um veranderte Perspektiven fur die gegenwartige Situation zu gewinnen. Diskutiert werden nicht nur die in bezug auf die Rolle der Arbeit unerwartet unterschiedlichen Wertsysteme der europaischen Entwicklung von der Antike bis zur Neuzeit, sondern auch mehrere durch eigene religios-kulturelle Wertsysteme gepragte Traditionen. Neben Grundlinien der judischen und der islamischen Kultur werden etwa die Bedingungen im klassischen und modernen China und in afrikanischen Kulturen thematisiert. Auch ohne die Illusion, aus solchen Vergleichen Maximen fur die Losung von Problemen der (post-)modernen Industriegesellschaften gewinnen zu konnen, sind die Divergenzen moglicher Lebensformen und Wertsysteme aufschlussreich, oft uberraschend und insofern vielleicht doch hilfreich."

This volume, compiled to honour Klaus Baumgartner on his 65th birthday, assembles 15 articles on present-day problems of (lexical) semantics. Their main focus is on the links between syntax and semantics, the problem of a representational as opposed to a dynamic conception of meaning, and the question of the conceptual foundations of semantics. The studies themselves examine a broad range of phenomena - from prepositions, temporal conjunctions, verbs and their argument structure to the way semantics relates to the textual plane."