Research Rummage Box

Pre-publication versions of papers, and other material

Who am I, and what is this all about?

My work in linguistics concerns many different aspects of negative polarity items (syntax, semantics, psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics), topics in (computational) semantics, corpus linguistics and mathematical foundations of linguistic theories. Every year I spend some time with Gerald Penn on the extension of the TRALE grammar implementation environment. Our work there ranges from the graphical user interface to debugging tools and, most importantly, improving the implementation of Lexical Resource Semantics in a computational framework we call CLLRS. Last but not least I fill the role of server administrator at our department, which is why this page is on the Internet at all, like all the other electronic tools and repositories of our department.

Among the semantic and computational semantic topics of the various papers from between 2007 and 2009 below are: The interaction of strong quantifiers and epistemic modals in English and German (joint work with Manfred Sailer), polyadic quantification as a means to analyze negative concord (with Gianina Iordăchioaia), the analysis of German negative polarity items (with Jan-Philipp Soehn), a typologically oriented comparative analysis of negative concord in German and French (with Manfred Sailer), and a comparison of semantics in Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar and Lexical Resource Semantics (with Laura Kallmeyer).

Term paper on Verum Focus, 1993

In the spring term of 1993 at UMass Amherst, I wrote a term paper on Verum Focus for a seminar on focus and quantification taught by Barbara Partee. This term paper is still occasionally cited in the literature, and every few years, I receive emails from students or scholars requesting a copy. Given the ongoing interest, I've decided to make it available online: Settling the Truth. Verum Focus in German (pdf)
The notes in the margins are comments from Barbara Partee.

Various papers from between 2007 and 2009

• Frank Richter, Manfred Sailer & Beata Trawiński: The Collection of Distributionally Idiosyncratic Items. An Interface between Data and Theory
  To appear in: Stefaniya Ptashnyk, Erla Hallsteinsdóttir, Noah Bubenhofer (eds): Computergestützte und korpusbasierte Methoden in der Phraseologie, Phraseografie und der Lexikografie
  Submitted version (September 2009): Negative Polarity Items in CoDII (pdf)
• Manfred Sailer & Frank Richter: Phraseological Clauses as Constructions in HPSG
  In: Preproceedings of the 16th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
• Gianina Iordăchioaia & Frank Richter: Negative Concord in Romanian as Polyadic Quantification
  In: Preproceedings of the 16th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
• Frank Richter & Manfred Sailer (2008): Simple Trees with Complex Semantics: On Epistemic Modals and Strong Quantifiers (12 pages)
  In: Maribel Romero (ed): Which Syntax Feeds Semantics? Proceedings of the ESSLLI'08 Workshop What Syntax Feeds Semantics, organised as part of ESSLLI 2008 in Hamburg, Germany, August 11-15, 2008. pp 70-81
  Final version: richtersailer08.pdf
• Frank Richter & Laura Kallmeyer (2007): Feature Logic-based Semantic Composition: A Comparison between LRS and LTAG (55 pages)
  Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Typed Feature Structure Grammars (TFSG'06).
  Submitted paper: richterkallmeyer.pdf
• Ekaterina Ovchinnikova & Frank Richter (2007): Morph Moulder: Teaching Software for HPSG and Description Logics (12 pages)
  Published in the Journal of the Interest Group in Pure and Applied Logic, Oxford University Press.
  Submitted version (May 31st, 2007): MoMo paper (pdf)
• Frank Richter & Manfred Sailer (eds): Special issue on compositionality of the Journal of Research on Language and Computation, Vol. 5(4), 2007.
  Introduction by the editors: Introduction (pdf)

Drafts and preliminary versions of papers (from before the above)

• In late September 2004 I submitted my Habilitationsschrift Foundations of Lexical Resource Semantics (written April through September 2004). Please contact me if you would like to obtain a copy. Parts of it appeared in very different shape in papers that have been published since.
• In a paper published in a special issue of the journal Sprache und Datenverarbeitung, I described the experiences I made with creating the Web-based course Grammar Formalisms and Parsing. The paper was in German.
  Frank Richter (2003): Erfahrungen bei der Erstellung des Web-basierten Kurses ``Grammar Formalisms and Parsing''. (16 pages)
  sdv-richter.ps (214788 bytes)
  sdv-richter.ps.gz (87107 bytes)

A Web-based Course in Grammar Formalisms and Parsing

A Web-based Course in Grammar Formalisms and Parsing is a textbook on grammar writing in HPSG. It originated within the project Grammar Formalisms and Parsing of the MiLCA consortium and later reached over 370 pages in its pdf edition. It served as textbook in one of my courses at Universität Tübingen. Since it comprises many different textual and computational components, there is a separate web page for it.

Improved Bibtex-XML-HTML software package

The software package for translating bibtex bibliographies to webpages that I have been working on with colleagues and students in the past few years is finally available for Linux. Here are the new webpages:
The Bibtex-XML-HTML Project Pages

---

Frank Richter