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Zusammenfassung Im Deutschen gibt es mehrere Formen der Kopula+Infinitiv-Struktur, deren Bedeutungen sich zum Teil decken, zum anderen Teil jedoch trennen. Die vorliegende Diskussion geht zum einen der Frage nach, wie bei solchen Formen die Absentivbedeutung (de Groot 2000, Abraham 2007) zustande kommt – ob sie nach rein lexikalischen Voraussetzungen zustande kommt, nachgrammatischen oder nach origo-pragmatischen Diskursvoraussetzungen – undinwieweit sich die unterschiedlichen Konstruktionsformen hinsichtlich derAbsentivbedeutung unterscheiden und vor welchem genauen Hintergrund siedies tun. Dieser Aufsatz hat seine endgültige Form durch Revision nach feinfühliger Gutachterarbeit erhalten. Die Hauptfrage gilt jedoch Diesings Annahme, dass sich Geschehensphasenprädikate (stage level predicates/SLP Stage level und individual level predicates haben allgemein und besonders im Deutschen viel Forschungsinteresse erfahren. Ich stelle dessen Wert als neue Forschungsfrage dahin, würde doch zu allen Fragestellungen die Einordnung unter das Origomerkmal [±hic-et-nunc] nicht nur hinreichen, sondern darüber hinaus den nötigen bühlerschen sprecherdeiktischen Hintergrund herstellen. Man vgl. vor allem auch Maienborn 2003. Zudem erscheint die Terminologiewahl mit individual level äußerst irreführend – individual weist ja nun gerade nicht auf permanente Eigenschaften hin, was es eigentlich sollte. ) mithilfe einer eigenen davidsonschen Ereignisvalenz von Essenzprädikaten (individual level predicates/ILP) unterscheiden lassen. Hier wird postuliert, dass sich statt eigener Lexikoneinträge für SLP und ILP die typologisch häufig vorkommende grammatische Unterscheidung einer v P-Kopula- sein ( sein ser ) und adverbiell eingeschränkten v P-vP-Kopula- sein ( sein estar ) verwenden lässt. Voraussetzung dafür wäre allerdings, dass der lexikalische Eintrag von Verben beider Klassen (Phasen- ebenso wie Essenz-) als sein ser/estar +V nichtfinit erscheint. Die Frage ist dann, welche der nichtfiniten Verbformen für diesen Lexikoneintragtypus in Frage kommen. Die Entscheidung fällt zugunsten der mittelalter-modistischen universalgrammatischen Lösung, also generell für alle Prädikate <Kopula+nichtfinite Verbform>.

The article is a short reaction to the Zámečník’s paper The nature of the explanation in the synergetic linguistics (2014) which claims that the synergetic linguistics lacks full-fledged explanation and praises the Menzerath-Altmann Law for its explanatory power. However, this paper shows that the synergetic linguistic explanatory mechanism is comparable to the mechanism of Menzerath-Altmann Law and that it aims to follow the explanatory logic of white-box models in other sciences like ecology. The quantitative linguistic laws in general often lack clear information about the known principles from which they are derived, what stochastic process they represent and what the interpretation of their parameters is, but it does not mean that they are intrinsically wrong and that we are in a critical need for a paradigm shift.

Judicial ideology is a latent trait that cannot be directly observed; its measurement must rely upon inferences drawn from observable traits or properties. In this paper, we assume that judicial ideologies of Supreme Court Justices may be inferred from the contents or themes of their authorial opinion texts, which embody their jurisprudential interpretation and reasoning on particular disputes of hard cases. The contents or themes of six opinion texts of “Bush v. Gore 2000” are analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively, with the latter as the focus. An indicator is borrowed from quantitative linguistics (QL) to quantify individual thematic words which contribute to the contents or themes of the text, that is, “thematic concentration” (TC). Our research yields the following results: First, both the highest and lowest TC value are found in the dissenting opinions, which may indicate the dynamism of thematic concentration of this type of opinion; Second, the common “thematic words” distilled from six opinions help to lexically profile the key “content domain” of this case; Third, the only thematic word “state” which appears in almost all opinion texts can be regarded as representing the most fundamental characteristic of the genre of appellate court opinions; Fourth, there exists a significant difference of TC in texts between the majority opinion and the dissenting opinion but not within the majority opinion, indicating that TC can reflect in a correct direction of the ideological stances of Supreme Court Justices; Fifth, TC in texts of three opinions get together, and qualitative analysis of these three opinions also shows that they concentrate on similar themes. The application of TC still have some challenges, but at least it offers an alternative path to measure ideologies of Supreme Court Justices, which contributes to the progress and development of forensic linguistics.

Stemming or suffix stripping is the problem of removing suffixes from words to get the root word. Word endings can be removed by developing stripping rules dependent on the morphological knowledge of a specific language; obviously such approach cannot flourish in multilingual environment. Statistical approaches survive in multilingual environment but they require significant amount of computing. We define stemming as an optimization problem for the very first time in the literature. An Integer Program is being developed for the stemming problem. We exhibit our approach by applying it to clusters of English and Spanish words; moreover, the proposed method is also being compared with an established technique in the field for English language. An AMPL program of the proposed method has also been given in Appendix (A.2).