The two seemingly conflicting tendencies, synergy and divergence, are both fundamental to the advancement of any science. Their interplay defines the demarcation line between application-oriented and theoretical research. The papers in this festschrift in honour of Peter Hellwig are geared to answer questions that arise from this insight: where does the discipline of Computational Linguistics currently stand, what has been achieved so far and what should be done next. Given the complexity of such questions, no simple answers can be expected. However, each of the practitioners and researchers are contributing from their very own perspective a piece of insight into the overall picture of today's and tomorrow's computational linguistics.