When something is in focus, light falls on it from different angles. The lexicon can be viewed from different sides. Six views are represented in this volume: a cognitivist view of vagueness and lexicalization, a psycholinguistic view of lexical access in speech production, a patholinguistic view of lexical organization in schizophrenics, and three analyses from different points of view in computational linguistics, which deal with problems of the syntax-semantics interface, compositionality, and systematic polysemy. A metalinguistic initial contribution outlines the historical development of lexical semantics with its complementary, competing and converging strands. The introduction completes this integration of the different facets of research into a wider picture of lexicology.