Towards an English Constructicon using patterns and frames

Abstract

Recent research in construction grammar has been marked by increasing efforts to create constructicons: detailed inventories of form-meaning pairs to describe the grammar of a given language, following the principles of construction grammar. This paper describes proposals for building a new constructicon of English, based on the combination of the COBUILD Grammar Patterns and the semantic frames of FrameNet. In this case study, the valency information from FrameNet was automatically matched to the verb patterns of COBUILD, in order to identify the frames that each pattern is associated with. We find that the automatic procedure must be complemented by a good deal of manual annotation. We examine the “V that” pattern in particular, illustrating how the frame information can be used to describe this pattern in terms of constructions.

Constructionist approaches: Past, present, future

“…Third, lexicographic approaches such as the various ongoing "construct-i-con" projects (see e.g. the contributions in Lyngfelt et al 2018 andPatten 2019), which in turn can prove relevant for appliedlinguistic contexts such as L2 learning and teaching, often rely on network approaches to characterize the relations between the units they describe.…”

“…. Constructional inventories, or "construct-i-cons" (see Section 4), are currently being built for several languages, including English(Perek & Patten 2019), German(Ziem et al 2019), Russian(Janda et al 2018) and Brazilian Portuguese(Torrent et al 2018; see Lyngfelt et al 2018 for further examples).…”

Exploring individual variation in constructional schematicity using random effects

“…Faced with a similar problem, some previous studies adopted Pattern Grammar (Hunston & Francis 2000) as a systematic description of all grammatical patterns in English (Ellis et al 2016;Perek & Patten 2019). However, at least in this study the approach was not entirely suitable.…”

Investigating the psychological reality of argument structure constructions and N1 of N2 constructions: A comparison between L1 and L2 speakers of English

“…Despite this repeated finding in the literature, however, most studies have focused on one type of construction only, argument structure constructions, leaving many other construction types underexamined (Liu and McManus 2020;Perek and Patten 2019). If construction grammar is committed to accounting for the entire lexicogrammatical system of a language (Tomasello 2006), research is needed that investigates how speakers interpret the meaning of a wider range of constructions.…”

“…In terms of the N1 of N2 constructions, we identified four types following (i) Hunston's (2022;also Hunston and Su 2020) definition of a construction as the pairing of a corpus-derived grammar pattern with a specific meaning and (ii) corpus-based analyses verifying that the N1 of N2 grammar pattern expresses specific constructional meanings, in line with cognitive construction grammar. Importantly, however, even though corpus-based methods can be used to effectively identify and analyze constructions (Ellis et al 2016;Liu and Lu 2020;Perek and Patten 2019;Römer 2019;Römer and Berger 2019), few studies have examined speakers' interpretations of these corpus-derived constructions. The current study not only extends the sorting task protocol to include N1 of N2 constructions, but it also seeks to examine the psychological reality of N1 of N2 constructions.…”