This collection of papers is the outcome of the first Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language conference (CSDL) held at the University of California, San Diego. In October 1995, CSDL was organized with the intention of bringing together researchers from both "cognitive" and "functional" approaches to linguistics. The papers in this volume span a variety of topics, but there is a common thread running through them: the claim that semantics and discourse properties are fundamental to our understanding of language.