Not for Love or Money: Collocations!

Manfred Sailer and Frank Richter

Paper presented at Formal Grammar 2002 in Trento, Italy, in the beginning of August.

Published in: Gerhard Jäager, Paola Monachesi, Gerald Penn and Shuly Wintner (Eds.): Proceedings of Formal Grammar 2002, July 2002, pp. 149-160

Abstract

We will discuss the distribution of the German verbs fackeln (hesitate; dither, in the sense of acting nervously or indecisively) and wahrhaben (literally have true; admit to oneself). Both are Negative Polarity Items which must fall in the scope of more semantic operators than just negation: a durational modifier in the case of fackeln and a modal operator for wahrhaben. We will argue that a collocation module is needed to account for the obligatory presence of the additional operators. The collocational requirements must be expressed with reference to the logical form of the operators. We, then, can show that the negation sensitivity can be accounted for by the same collocational mechanism, referring to the logical form of the licensing context rather than to its entailment properties.

Electronically available file formats of the paper (12 pages):

Bibtex entry: 

@inproceedings{Sailer:Richter:fg02,
          author    = {Manfred Sailer and Frank Richter},
          title     = {Not for Love or Money: Collocations!},
          booktitle = {Proceedings of Formal Grammar 2002},
          editor    = {Gerhard J\"ager and Paola Monachesi and
                       Gerald Penn and Shuly Wintner},
          pages     = {149--160},
          year      = {2002}
}

Frank Richter