Shall We Play the Festschrift Game?

There are not many people who can be said to have influenced and impressed researchers in so many disparate areas and language-geographic fields as Lauri Carlson, as is evidenced in the present Festschrift.His insight and acute linguistic sensitivity and linguistic rationality have spawned findings and research work in many areas, from non-standard etymology to hardcore formal linguistics, not forgetting computational areas such as parsing, terminological databases, and, last but not least, machine translation.In addition to his renowned and widely acknowledged insights in tense and aspect and its relationship with nominal quantification, and his ground-breaking work in dialog using game-theoretic machinery, Lauri has in the last fifteen years as Professor of Language Theory and Translation Technology contributed immensely to areas such as translation, terminology and general applications of computational linguistics.The three editors of the present volume have successfully performed doctoral studies under Lauri’s supervision, and wish with this volume to pay tribute to his supervision and to his influence in matters associated with research and scientific, linguistic and philosophical inquiry, as well as to his humanity and friendship.

Dr. Diana Santos is associate professor of Portuguese at the University of Oslo and she has worked in computational linguistics, contrastive studies, and corpus-based semantics for more than 25 years, being the leader of Linguateca, a resource center for the computational processing of the Portuguese language.Dr. Krister Linden is research director of FIN-CLARIN at the University of Helsinki and he has worked in computational linguistics, language technology and language studies for more than 25 years.Dr. Wanjiku Ng'ang'a is a senior faculty member at the School of Computing and Informatics, University of Nairobi, and is also a Research Lead in the C4DLab which undertakes R&D in ICT4D. Her research work in language technology focuses on African languages, having worked on Swahili, Gikuyu and Igbo.