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.

The paper deals with verbs of throwing in Hill Mari (Finno-Ugric). The data were collected in fieldwork mainly by elicitation, as well as by analyzing the corpus of transcribed oral narratives. First of all, two dominant lexemes of this semantic field are taken into account. These lexemes display clear differences in their Aktionsart properties. The differences between the lexemes with regard to a number of parameters previously proposed in typology are investigated, their relevance is evaluated. New parameters for their opposition are put forward. In addition, the article discusses the peripheral verbs of adjacent semantic fields (destruction and distribution in space). The correlations between more general distributive semantics of the peripheral lexemes and their semantic content in the contexts of throwing are considered. Special attention is paid to the grammaticalization of dominant verbs of throwing in complex verb constructions and to the analysis of their distributional constraints. Both the similarities between the constructions (participant with a semantic role of Patient, semantics of destruction) and the diff erences between them (constraints on plurality) are studied. Data on complex verb constructions are also discussed in the light of the cross-linguistic variation in the semantic shifts typical of the domain under consideration

This paper proposes an analysis of systemic relations between constructions with modal semantics in Russian. Based on the data from the Russian Constructicon resource, I build a classification of 124 constructions expressing root (dynamic and deontic) and epistemic meanings. The classification relies on the taxonomy of constructions, which is being developed in recent studies in Construction Grammar and constructicography. This taxonomy involves groups of constructions of various size (namely, families, clusters, and networks of constructions). A constructional family comprises modal constructions with similar semantic (and often also morphosyntactic) properties. Families form larger units — constructional clusters and networks, which have a radial category structure, where more central and more peripheral members can be identified. This paper pinpoints that some semantic domains are better described in terms of scalar rather than radial structures, and epistemic modal constructions serve as an example of such domain. I establish conceptual links between the families of constructions, such as specification vs. generalization strategies, contrast, intensification vs. attenuation of particular semantic components, etc. The classification proposed in the paper contributes both to typology in that it refines the existing view on the structure of modality and its linguistic expression, and to constructicography, which is concerned with the mechanisms of constructional interaction within the system of a given language.