The volume is a Festschrift for Franz Hundsnurscher and is published to coincide with his 65th birthday. It contains 47 articles focussing on two subjects of central moment in the work of Franz Hundsnurscher: semantics and dialogue analysis. The first section assembles contributions both on fundamental semantic issues and on the semantic description of idiomatic expressions, the use of FremdwArter in German, and basic vocabulary. Alongside synchronic (mostly usage-theoretical) studies on individual words and quasi-synonyms in German there are also articles of a historical and contrastive nature. The studies in the second section concentrate on theoretical and methodological questions posed by dialogue analysis and issues in the analysis of institutional communication (politics, law, economics) and literary dialogue.