Exact methods in the study of language and text

The volume is dedicated to the 75th birthday of Gabriel Altmann, whose name guarantees that the topics of the Festschrift are focusing on exact methods in the study of language and text. The book includes 66 original papers, of which 45 are in English and the remainder in German. In the preface – carrying as a title the carefully chosen motto Viribus Quantitatis – the two editors introduce Professor Gabriel Altmann to the reader. After that, 66 papers are presented in alphabetical order of contributors’ surname. It is difficult to fully introduce and review a volume with more than 60 papers. Here, we can only mention some papers directly related to quantitative linguistics, mainly selected according to my personal expertise. Sergej Andreev makes a quantitative diachronic analysis of Longfellow’s style. Based on more than 40 factors, he differentiates four main stages in the creative activity of Longfellow. Karl-Heinz Best explores the diversification of German family names looking at several examples, whereas Hermann Bluhme elects to focus only on the geographical distribution of Schmidts in Austria. Emı́lia Nemcová investigates semantic diversification of verbal prefixes in Slovak. Solomija Buk and Adrij Rovenchak provide the statistical parameters of Ivan Franko’s novel The Cross-Paths. The paper also compares the top-ranked words in this novel to other similar works in English, Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 2008, Volume 15, Number 3, pp. 287 – 291 DOI: 10.1080/09296170802159553