Zdenek Kirschner died

One of the most active and most systematic researchers of the Prague group of computational linguistics, Dr. Zdeněk Kirschner, born January 15, 1924, died on the Christmas Eve 2008, three weeks before his 85th birthday. Zdeněk joined our research group in the spring of 1970, after his return from a longer stay in Tanzania, where he, among other things, was engaged in the education and cultural orientation of the fighters for the freedom ofMosambique; some of them later visited him in Prague as esteemed representatives of their country andmembers of its government. One of the first questions Zdeněk had to answer after his arrival concerned, as it was usual in the given historical situation, was his attitude towards the Soviet led invasion of Czechoslovakia. Since he did not approve this event, he was excluded from the communist party. Even so, he was allowed to apply for a position at Charles University, where twenty years earlier he obtained his PhD. degree in English studies. He then had to decide between two options at the Faculty of Arts, one of which was to join the then established institute oriented at Ibero-American studies and the other concerned our invitation to the research group represented at that time as the Laboratory of Algebraic Linguistics. We were glad that he chose the latter possibility, and luckily we were quick enough to accept him before the political difficulties became too heavy not only for him, but also for us. Due to his exclusion from the communist party it was impossible to quote him as the author of his contributions and thus we included the first of them as an anonymous appendix to the volume Automatische Textenbearbeitung (Prague, Matematickofyzikální fakulta Univerzity Karlovy 1974, pp. 86-156. It constitutes an extremely systematic and detailed analysis of the functions of the English presposition in in different contexts, which even today can serve as an important source of relevant insights (in case of interest, the text may be copied and shared). Most of Zdeněk’s further contributions appeared in the internal series which followed this volume, namely Explizite Beschreibung der Sprache und automatische Textbear-