In this paper we will discuss semantic aspects of collocational prepositional phrases (CPPs) consisting of sequences. Based on the syntactic analysis in , which assumes prepositions heading combinations to be able to raise and syntactically realize complements of their arguments, we will investigate whether the semantic representations of these expressions can be derived compositionally. We will discuss German CPPs with respect to two criteria of internal semantic regularity taken from (Sailer, 2003), and we will observe that the expressions in question are not uniform with regard to their semantic properties. While the logical form of some of them can be computed by means of ordinary meaning assignment and a set of standard derivational operations, others require additional handling methods. However, there are approaches available within the HPSG paradigm which are able to account for these data. Here we will briefly present the external selection approach of (Soehn, 2003) and the phrasal lexical entries approach of (Sailer, 2003), and we will demonstrate how they interact with the syntactic approach of .

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This article examines idiomatic expressions as sources of both regularity and irregularity in language. Some morphological, lexical, syntactical, and semantical characteristics of idioms are discussed. It is shown how a lexical licensing mechanism, which is formulated within a formal grammar framework, can deal with the data. After that, this proposal is extended to the phenomenon of negative polarity.

As the nature of negative polarity items (NPIs) and their licensing contexts is still under much debate, a broad empirical basis is an important cornerstone to support further insights in this area of research. The work discussed in this paper is intended as a contribution to realizing this objective. We briefly introduce the phenomenon of NPIs and outline major theories about their licensing and also various licensing contexts before discussing our major topics: Firstly, a corpus-based retrieval method for NPI candidates is described that ranks the candidates according to their distributional dependence on the licensing contexts. Our method extracts single-word candidates and is extended to also capture multi-word candidates. The basic idea for automatically collecting NPI candidates from a large corpus is that an NPI behaves like a kind of collocate to its licensing contexts. Manual inspection and Interpretation of the candidate lists identify the actual NPIs. Secondly, an online repository for NPIs and other items that show distributional idiosyncrasies is presented, which offers an empirical database for further (theoretical) research on these items in a sustainable way.

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