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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
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