Cover not available
Article published In:
Constructions in Applied Linguistics
Edited by Susan Hunston and Florent Perek
[International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 24:3] 2019
► pp. 354–384

Towards an English Constructicon using patterns and frames

| University of Birmingham
| University of Birmingham

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.

Keywords: constructicon, COBUILD, FrameNet, construction grammar, lexicogrammar
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The COBUILD Grammar Patterns
  • 3.FrameNet
  • 4.Two complementary resources
  • 5.Merging the two resources
  • 6.Towards the English constructicon: A case study of the “V that” construction
    • 6.1From patterns to networks of frames
    • 6.2The Communication “V that” construction
    • 6.3The Mental_activity “V that” construction
    • 6.4Other “V that” constructions and relations between constructions
  • 7.Summary and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.00016.per
References

References

Boas, H. C.
(2003) A Constructional Approach to Resultatives. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
(2008) Determining the structure of lexical entries and grammatical constructions in Construction Grammar. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 6 1, 113–144. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J.
(2010) Language, Usage and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2013) Usage-based theory and exemplar representations of constructions. In T. Hoffmann & G. Trousdale (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar (pp. 49–69). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bybee, J., & Eddington, D.
(2006) A usage-based approach to Spanish verbs of ‘becoming’. Language, 82 (2), 323–355. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, N.
(1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Croft, W.
(2003) Lexical rules vs. constructions: A false dichotomy. In H. Cuyckens, T. Berg, R. Dirven, & K.-U. Panther (Eds.), Motivation in Language: Studies in Honour of Günter Radden (pp. 49–68). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fillmore, C. J.
(1985) Frames and the semantics of understanding. Quaderni di Semantica, VI (2), 222–254.Google Scholar
(1999) Inversion and constructional inheritance. In G. Webelhuth, J.-P. Koenig & A. Kathol (Eds.), Lexical and Constructional Aspects of Linguistic Explanation (pp. 113–128). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Fillmore, C. J., & Atkins, B. T.
(1992) Towards a frame-based Lexicon: The semantics of RISK and its neighbors. In A. Lehrer & E. Kittay (Eds.), Frames, Fields and Contrasts: New Essays in Semantic and Lexical Organization (pp. 75–102). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Fillmore, C. J., Kay, P., & O’Connor, M. C.
(1988) Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions: The case of let alone . Language, 64 (3), 501–538.Google Scholar
Fillmore, C. J., Lee-Goldman, R. R., & Rhomieux, R.
(2012) The FrameNet Constructicon. In I. A. Sag & H. C. Boas (Eds.), Sign-Based Construction Grammar (pp. 283–322). Stanford, CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
Francis, G.
(1993) A corpus-driven approach to grammar – principles, methods and examples. In M. Baker, G. Francis & E. Tognini-Bonelli (Eds.), Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair (pp. 137–156). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Francis, G., Hunston, S. & Manning, E.
(1996) Collins COBUILD Grammar Patterns 1: Verbs. London: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
(1998) Collins COBUILD Grammar Patterns 2: Nouns and Adjectives. London: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Fried, M., & Östman, J.-O.
(2004) Construction grammar: A thumbnail sketch. In M. Fried & J.-O. Östman (Eds.), Construction Grammar in a Cross-language Perspective (pp. 11–86). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K. & Matthiessen, C.
(2014) Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar (4th Edition). London & New York, NY: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Healy, A. & Miller, G.
(1970) The verb as the main determinant of sentence meaning. Psychonomic Science, 20 (6), 372. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hunston, S., & Francis, G.
(2000) Pattern Grammar: A Corpus-driven Approach to the Lexical Grammar of English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hunston, S. & Su, H.
(2017) Patterns, Constructions, and Local Grammar: A case study of ‘evaluation’. Applied Linguistics. Advance online publication. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, A. E.
(1995) Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
(2006) Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Goldberg, A. E., Casenhiser, D. M., & Sethuraman, N.
(2004) Learning argument structure generalizations. Cognitive Linguistics, 15 (3), 289–316. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Iwata, S.
(2008) Locative Alternation: A Lexical-constructional Approach. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kay, P., & Fillmore, C. J.
(1999) Grammatical constructions and linguistic generalizations: The What’s X doing Y? construction. Language, 75 (1), 1–33.Google Scholar
Langacker, R. W.
(2000) A dynamic usage-based model. In M. Barlow & S. Kemmer (Eds.), Usage-based Models of Language (pp. 1–63). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Lee-Goldman, R., & Petruck, M. R. L.
(2018) The FrameNet Constructicon in action. In B. Lyngfelt, L. Borin, K. Ohara & T. T. Torrent (Eds.), Constructicography: Constructicon Development Across Languages (pp. 19–40). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins. DOI logo
Lyngfelt, B., Borin, L., Forsberg, M., Prentice, J., Rydstedt, R., Sköldberg, E., & Tingsell, S.
(2012) Adding a Constructicon to the Swedish resource network of Språkbanken. In Proceedings of KONVENS 2012 (LexSem 2012 workshop) (pp. 452–461). Vienna. Retrieved from [URL] (last accessed April 2019).
Lyngfelt, B., Borin, L., Ohara, K., & Torrent, T. T.
(Eds.) (2018) Constructicography: Constructicon Development Across Languages. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ohara, K. H.
(2013) Toward constructicon building for Japanese in Japanese FrameNet. Veredas, 17 (1), 11–27.Google Scholar
Perek, F.
(2014) Rethinking constructional polysemy: The case of the English conative construction. In D. Glynn & J. Robinson (Eds.), Polysemy and Synonymy: Corpus Methods and Applications in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Perek, F., & Lemmens, M.
(2010) Getting at the meaning of the English at-construction: The case of a constructional split. CogniTextes, 5 1. Retrieved from [URL] (last accessed April 2019). DOI logo
Ruppenhofer, J., Ellsworth, M., Petruck, M. R. L., Johnson, C. R., & Scheffczyk, J.
(2016) FrameNet II: Extended theory and practice. Berkeley: ICSI. Retrieved from [URL] (last accessed April 2019).
Sinclair, J. et al.
(Eds.) (1995) Collins COBUILD English Dictionary 2nd Edition. London: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Talmy, L.
(1996) The windowing of attention in language. In M. Shibatani & S. A. Thompson (Eds.), Grammatical Constructions: Their Form and Meaning (pp. 235–287). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
(2000) Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Torrent, T. T., Lage, L. M., Sampaio, T. F., Tavares, T. S., & Matos, E. E. S.
(2014) Revisiting border conflicts between FrameNet and Construction Grammar: Annotation policies for the Brazilian Portuguese Constructicon. Constructions and Frames, 6 (1), 34–51. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 11 other publications

Bychkova, Polina & Ekaterina Rakhilina
2023. Chapter 3. Towards pragmatic construction typology. In Discourse Phenomena in Typological Perspective [Studies in Language Companion Series, 227], ► pp. 35 ff. DOI logo
Dunn, Jonathan
2022. Exposure and emergence in usage-based grammar: computational experiments in 35 languages. Cognitive Linguistics 33:4 ► pp. 659 ff. DOI logo
Littlemore, Jeannette
2023. ‘Oscar sent Venice an elephant’: Construction Grammars and Second Language Learning. In Applying Cognitive Linguistics to Second Language Learning and Teaching, ► pp. 231 ff. DOI logo
Liu, Yingying & Xiaofei Lu
2020. N1 of N2 constructions in academic written discourse: A pattern grammar analysis. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 47 ► pp. 100893 ff. DOI logo
Liu, Yingying & Kevin McManus
2023. Investigating the psychological reality of argument structure constructions and N1 of N2 constructions: a comparison between L1 and L2 speakers of English. Cognitive Linguistics 34:3-4 ► pp. 503 ff. DOI logo
Patel, Malin, Armine Garibyan, Elodie Winckel & Stephanie Evert
2023. A reference constructicon as a database. Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 11:1 ► pp. 175 ff. DOI logo
PEREK, FLORENT
2023. Construction Grammar and Usage‐Based Theory. In The Handbook of Usage‐Based Linguistics, ► pp. 215 ff. DOI logo
SUNG, MIN-CHANG
2023. Functional idiosyncrasies of suggesting constructions in British English. English Language and Linguistics 27:2 ► pp. 321 ff. DOI logo
Ungerer, Tobias & Stefan Hartmann
2023. Constructionist Approaches, DOI logo
Yan, Hengbin & Yinghui Li
2024. Constraction: a tool for the automatic extraction and interactive exploration of linguistic constructions. Linguistics Vanguard 9:1 ► pp. 215 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2022. Discourse Structuring Markers in English [Constructional Approaches to Language, 33], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 31 march 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.