Volume 5, Issue 1

The present paper deals with the so-called ‘fate future’, a use of the German modal verb sollen in a specific epistemic usage. It will be shown that the fate future rests on the reportative reading of sollte and that other modals in the paradigm cannot replace sollte +infinitive in the specific reading of the fate future. Very generally, the position is held that epistemic readings of the modals are not due to Traugott's grammaticalizing notion of subjectification, but that they are genuine, and to all appearances, also historically original and primary uses.

Sentence is the highest linguistic level for a grammarian. However, a text may be subdivided in units which may but need not consist of sentences. The article concerns the intermediate space between text and sentence and searches for possible supra-sentence entities. At the same time, it shows their interrelations whose mathematization could lead to a special aspect of text theory.

The purpose of this paper is to present some further evidence for the validity of the logistic law in language change. To this end we test some data on the increase of the constituent gegen- in Modern German (Klosa 2003).

The Historic German Valency Dictionary should not be only a synchronic description of the valency of a selection of Old High German, Middle High German and Early Hew High German verbs, but also illustrate the history of valency (diachronic) of these verbs within a semantic field. This paper gives an overview of the previous research undertaken in the field of the history of valency. Based on a case study, it develops a method to illustrate the history of valency by the comparison of synchronic historic cross-sections.

As an ideographic system, Chinese writing is not based on the irreducible elements used in speaking (e.g., syllabic or alphabetic elements) as in phonetic systems. Consequently, there is a misperception that in Chinese writing, each character is treated as a separate symbol, which makes it seem very difficult to learn Chinese writing. In the modern study of Chinese ideography, the elements of Chinese writing are called components, which can play a quadruple role in composing characters. Based on this understanding of components, this paper uses the mathematical tree model to analyse the structure of Chinese characters and create a computational description of all of the character structures explained in Shuowen Jiezi , a character dictionary of Chinese seal script. Using this methodology, this paper also performs a statistical analysis of synchronic Chinese characters and provides quantitative data to illustrate the systematic nature of Chinese writing. There is much room for further research using this methodology.

In this article terminologisation means the constitution of terminological systems by introducing resp. defining terms within texts. By using three short text examples in German three ways of terminological linearisation , i.e. ordering terminological units within a textual progression, are shown: a didactic-structural, a discursive-contentual, and a normative-alphabetic linearisation strategy.

This investigation focuses on the nature of explanation in synergetic linguistics. After recounting the basic principles of Haken s synergetics, a physicalist stance constitutes the basis of a critique of using the stringent synergetic principle of synergetic linguistics. Jaegwon Kim has convincingly demonstrated that the strict synergetic principle impairs quantitative linguistics with downward causation. The central part of this paper demonstrates that the synergetic principle is not an appropriate principle on which to construct a valid functional explanation of quantitative linguistics. The final section analyses the concept of law in quantitative linguistics. We examine a series of laws as models and economization principles and we outline a conception of laws as various categories of conservation principles.