Frank Richter: Negative Polarity Items as Collocations: From Theory to Implementation

In this talk I will present the collocational theory of negative polarity items put forth in [Sailer & Richter 2002] and [Richter & Soehn 2006] and discuss issues of its implementation in the TRALE system. I will focus on the computational behavior of a lexical theory of idiomatic expressions and on problems of implementing an adequate semantic theory in a constraint-based parsing system.

This talk also provides the theoretical background to the talk by Janina Rado, who will present psycholinguistic evidence for the constraint-based theory of negative polarity items that we will review here. This talk might thus be taken to be the first half of a joint talk which looks at two aspects of the collocational theory of NPIs, one computational and one psycholinguistic.