This article addresses the possibility of linking constructicon resources for different languages, in particular English and Swedish. The entries in Berkeley’s English constructicon have been compared to Swedish, with a focus on potential correspondences in a Swedish constructicon. In most cases, approximately corresponding Swedish constructions could be established, although typically with minor differences, often concerning grammatical markers. The closest equivalents are, typically, relatively general grammatical constructions, whereas constructions containing specific lexical elements tend to differ more. In order to link all corresponding constructions between the two resources, a combination of strategies seems to be required. Constructions with a referential meaning may be linked via FrameNet frames, while those with a more abstract grammatical function may be related in terms of their grammatical properties.

This paper presents a semi-automatic approach to acquire a computational construction grammar from the semi-formal Swedish Constructicon. The implementation is based on the resource grammar library provided by Grammatical Framework and can be seen as an extension to the existing Swedish resource grammar. An important consequence of this work is that it generates feedback, explicit and implicit, on how to improve the annotation consistency and adequacy of the original construction resource.

We present an experiment where natural language processing tools are used to automatically identify potential constructions in a corpus. The experiment was conducted as part of the ongoing efforts to develop a Swedish constructicon. Using an automatic method to suggest constructions has advantages not only for efficiency but also methodologically: it forces the analyst to look more objectively at the constructions actually occurring in corpora, as opposed to focusing on “interesting” constructions only. As a heuristic for identifying potential constructions, the method has proved successful, yielding about 200 (out of 1,200) highly relevant construction candidates.

This paper discusses the classification of null instantiation phenomena in Construction Grammar and proposes a different treatment of so-called free null instantiation (FNI). Based on e.g. control data, different types of alleged FNI are shown to be more accurately classified as definite (adjunct control), generic (e.g.toughconstructions), or unspecified for interpretation (e.g. passives). A striking pattern is that general constructions, such as infinitives and gerunds, license unspecified null instantiation (simply NI), whereas more specific control constructions are associated with a definite (DNI) or generic (GNI) interpretation. Hence, the paper proposes a null instantiation taxonomy that distinguishes (unspecified) NI and the specific subtypes definite (DNI), indefinite (INI), identity of sense (ISNA), and generic (GNI) null instantiation.

This book has been long in the making, but now having the result under our eyes, we believe that it was worth the wait. The idea of compiling a volume collecting the experiences of the various constructicon initiatives going on around the world was born in the context of an international collaboration between the universities at Gothenburg in Sweden and Juiz de Fora in Brazil, and the excellent opportunities to interact and learn from each other's experiences afforded by both research visits and the international FrameNet workshops organized jointly by the Swedish and Brazilian teams, together with the FrameNet group in Berkeley, California: IFNW 2013 in Berkeley, IFNW 2016, collocated with ICCG9 in Juiz de Fora, and the upcoming IFNW 2018 with the special theme Multilingual FrameNets and Constructicons, collocated with LREC in Miyazaki, Japan. Moreover, profitable discussions relevant to the works presented in this book took place in the special sessions Cognitively grounded lexica, constructicons, and metaphor repositories, at ICLC12 in Edmonton, Canada, in 2013, and Constructionist resources -a workshop in honor of Charles J. Fillmore, at ICCG8 in Osnabrück, Germany, in 2014.During these events, most -if not all -authors of the chapters in this volume had the chance to share their points of view, positions and questions on the development of constructionist resources. Beyond the group of authors whose contributions make this book, we'd like to thank our -and their -interlocutors.The work on preparing the volume has been funded in part by the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT), by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES, Brazil), and by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, RJ), but it could not have happened without the long-term support given to both Språkbanken (the Swedish Language Bank) -now well into its fifth decade -by the University of Gothenburg, its Faculty of Arts and its Department of Swedish, and to FrameNet Brasil by the Federal University of Juiz de Fora.The volume editors would like to express their gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their thorough and insightful comments and suggestions, to the series editor Jan-Ola Östman for his final vetting of the volume, and to Esther Roth and Susan Hendriks at John Benjamins, always helpful and unerringly professional, under whose watchful eyes the volume went from idea to finished product. Last but viii Constructicography not least, we are grateful to the person without whom none of all this would have happened: the late Charles J. Fillmore. For inspiring us all, for being a core element in our research frame(works), for having guided our ways into the development of constructicons, and for being such a great guy, we dedicate this volume to Chuck.