The project explored how and to what extent regular and irregular human language behaviours influence each other. This interesting interaction is a deciding factor in our understanding of the internal structure of language, and has an effect on the formulation of a descriptive grammar with explanatory power.
Especially insightful data for this project has been obtained with the help of lexical items which exhibit certain distribution idiosyncrasies. We focussed on the phenomenon of polarity. 'Negative polarity items', or NPIs, such as 'any' or 'ever' are found only in specific contexts, usually with negation, for example, 'no one understood anything' vs. '*someone understood anything'. The goal of the project A5 of the Sonderforschungsbereich 441 in Tuebingen, was a description of NPIs in the German language.
The counterpart to these NPIs are positive polarity items (PPIs), which are not found in negative contexts, for example 'rather' or 'already'. There has been very little research done in this area to date. The innovative aim of this project was therefore to describe these PPIs for German, to characterise them, and to integrate them into an existing database of words with distributional idiosyncrasies (CoDII). In order to achieve this, sources of data have been electronically available corpora, as well as native speaker judgements to be obtained from psycholinguistic experiments. These data have been used to continue the development of a distribution theory within the framework of HPSG, enabling these items to be modelled. This project was therefore an integral part of the collaborative research center 441 in Tuebingen.
The project has been funded for the period of February 2007 till January 2009 and was divided into the following three