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Article published In:
The Wealth and Breadth of Construction-Based Research
Edited by Timothy Colleman, Frank Brisard, Astrid De Wit, Renata Enghels, Nikos Koutsoukos, Tanja Mortelmans and María Sol Sansiñena
[Belgian Journal of Linguistics 34] 2020
► pp. 161–173

How to build a constructicon in five years

The Russian example

| UiT The Arctic University of Norway
| UiT The Arctic University of Norway
| National Research University Higher School of Economics
| Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences | Lomonosov Moscow State University
| National Research University Higher School of Economics | Vinogradov Institute for Russian language of the Russian Academy of Sciences

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 ([URL]). 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.

Keywords: constructicon, construction grammar, Russian, corpus
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
Published online: 28 May 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00043.jan
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