How to build a constructicon in five years
The Russian example
We provide a practical step-by-step methodology of how to build a full-scale constructicon resource for a natural
language, sharing our experience from the nearly completed project of the Russian Constructicon, an open-access searchable
database of over 2,200 Russian constructions (
https://site.uit.no/russian-constructicon/). The constructions are organized in families, clusters, and networks based
on their semantic and syntactic properties, illustrated with corpus examples, and tagged for the CEFR level of language
proficiency. The resource is designed for both researchers and L2 learners of Russian and offers the largest electronic database
of constructions built for any language. We explain what makes the Russian Constructicon different from other constructicons,
report on the major stages of our work, and share the methods used to systematically expand the inventory of constructions. Our
objective is to encourage colleagues to build constructicon resources for additional natural languages, thus taking Construction
Grammar to a new quantitative and qualitative level, facilitating cross-linguistic comparison.
Article outline
- 1.Why build a constructicon?
- 2.Features of the Russian Constructicon resource
- 2.1The scope of the project
- 2.2The presentation of constructions
- 3.Reaching and exceeding a critical mass of constructions
- 4.Identifying families: Theoretical motivation and methodology
- 4.1Theoretical motivation
- 4.2Methodology
- 5.Turning a list into a structured inventory
- 6.Conclusion
- Abbreviations
-
References
References (12)
References
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Lyngfelt, Benjamin, Linnéa Bäckström, Lars Borin, Anna Ehrlemark, and Rudolf Rydstedt. 2018. “Constructicography at Work: Theory Meets Practice in the Swedish Constructicon.” In Constructicography: Constructicon Development Across Languages, ed. by Benjamin Lyngfelt, Lars Borin, Kyoko Ohara, and Tiago T. Torrent, 41–106. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Bychkova, Polina & Ekaterina Rakhilina
Zhukova, Valentina
2023.
How to threaten in Russian: a constructionist approach.
Russian Linguistics 47:2
► pp. 141 ff.
Ziem, Alexander & Tim Feldmüller
2023.
Dimensions of constructional meanings in the German Constructicon: Why collo-profiles matter.
Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 11:1
► pp. 203 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.