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.

The study is concerned with fundamental aspects of figurative speech. The methodology underlying the approach is a concept of communicative grammar which has found its way into linguistics via language-analytic philosophy. Proceeding from an intensive discussion of traditional concepts and theorems, the study sets out to inquire into the way the formation and understanding of metaphors can be adequately described against the background of a pragmatic model. On the basis of a large corpus of newspaper texts, an example taken from the discourse on multi-media is drawn upon to show how a metaphor is introduced into language usage and the conditions under which repeated use can lead to habitualization and ultimately to conventionalization of a metaphorical expression.