The present volume contains a general overview of current theoretical and practical issues in lexicography with special emphasis on bilingual applications. The contributions are divided into four sections. The first three record the plenary sessions of the Second International Conference on Lexicography in Jyvaskyla in March 1994. The fourth section contains papers from workshops thematically linked more or less closely to the plenary sessions. The first section, "General theory of lexicography and lexicology" is opened by R. R. K. Hartmann (Exeter) who reviews the four traditional aspects of research on dictionaries, the history, typology, critical assessment and use of dictionaries, discussing their particular relevance to bilingual lexicography. W. Martin (Amsterdam) then discusses dictionary definitions and models for the representation of knowledge. Martin favours what he calls deliberate inconsistency whereby the lexicographer, while basing his work on an explicit system such as the frames and slots of artificial intelligence, in fact restricts his definitions to the most relevant information. The definition of meaning is but one aspect of the lemma. A further essential aspect is the question of how words can be combined. M. Järventausta (Savonlinna) shows how recent considerations in valency theory can be used to describe and compare the respective combinatory characteristics of (partial) semantic equivalents in German and Finnish. U. Heid (Stuttgart) presents a similar topic from a different theoretical perspective in his workshop paper on the ordering of information on syntactic structures in a contrastive dictionary for machine translation. The problem of combination is also discussed in the second (plenary) section on "Aspects of contrastive lexicograpy". In H.-P. Kromann's (Kopenhagen) contribution, "How much grammar does a bilingual dictionary need?" the matter is firstly reviewed from a macro-, medio- and microstructural viewpoint and then critically demonstrated using entries for the preposition über in mono- and bilingual dictionaries as an example. J. Korhonen (Helsinki) then suggests a model for describing verb-idioms in German-Finnish and Finnish-German dictionaries. The same theme is taken up by J. Toomar (Jyväskylä) in her workshop paper, an analysis of the lemmatization of standard verbal idioms in a German-Finnish dictionary. R. Frisch (Jyväskylä/Wurzburg) and I. Hyvärinen (Jyväskylä) concern themselves with word formation and dictionaries. Frisch critically assesses the treatment of lemmatized word-formation elements in German-Finnish dictionaries whereas Hyvärinen looks at the formation of antonyms to see whether lemmatized antonyms can be used to reveal systematic contrasts between languages. L. Tossavainen (Jyväskylä) also deals with word formation and lexicography in her workshop paper, concentrating especially on the lemmatization of compound nouns. The two contributions in the section on "Particular questions of lexicography" lend the volume a historical dimension. A. F. Kelletat (Germersheim) takes a look at Comenius's "Orbis sensualium pictus" from 1658, pointing out how its didactic innovations anticipate bi- or multilingual illustrated learners' dictionaries. K Keinästö (Oulu) presents a wide range of more recent German loan words in Finnish and then traces the fate of the word Krambambuli through German, Scandinavian and Finnish dictionaries and encyclopedias. The workshop papers in the fourth section draw attention to various specific aspects and problems. Apart from the papers already mentioned above they include work by B. Fuchs (Jyväskylä) and D. Neuendorff (Oulu) connecting the critical evaluation of dictionaries with dictionary user research, further lexicosemantic papers by S. Tschirpke (Helsinki/ Greifswald) and A. Uurasjärvi (Tampere) on lexical families and lexical fields and a paper by J. Boger (Jyväskylä) illustrating the special problems of dialect lexicography with experience from the Low Saxon Dictionary.