Collocations and the Representation of Polarity

Manfred Sailer and Frank Richter

Paper presented at The Seventh Symposium on Logic and Language in Pécs, Hungary, at the end of August 2002.

Published in: Gábor Alberti and Kata Balogh and Paul Dekker (Eds.): Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium on Logic and Language, pp. 129-138

Abstract

We discuss the distribution of the German verb fackeln (hesitate; dither, in the sense of acting nervously or indecisively). It is a Negative Polarity Item which must also fall in the scope of a durational modifier. We argue that a collocation module is needed to account for the obligatory presence of the durational modifier. The collocational requirement has to be expressed with reference to the logical form of the modifier. We show that the negation sensitivity can be accounted for by the same collocational mechanism, making reference to the logical form of the licensing context rather than to its entailment properties.

Electronically available file formats of the paper:

Bibtex entry: 

@inproceedings{Sailer:Richter:lola02,
          author    = {Manfred Sailer and Frank Richter},
          title     = {Collocations and the Representation of Polarity},
          booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium on Logic and Language},
          editor    = {G\'abor Alberti and Kata Balogh and Paul Dekker},
          pages     = {129--138},
          address   = {P\'ecs},
          year      = {2002}
}

Frank Richter