In:Constructicography: Constructicon development across languages
Edited by Benjamin Lyngfelt, Lars Borin, Kyoko Ohara and Tiago Timponi Torrent
[Constructional Approaches to Language 22] 2018
► pp. 41–106
Get fulltext
Chapter 3Constructicography at work
Theory meets practice in the Swedish constructicon
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Published online: 17 July 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.22.03lyn
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.22.03lyn
Abstract
This chapter addresses central topics in constructicography from the viewpoint of the Swedish constructicon project (SweCcn), focusing on practical constructicon development. The full process of construction description is described and discussed, from selection via corpus analysis to finished constructicon entry and beyond, towards structuring the set of entries into a network. Particular attention is given to the description format and the treatment of constructional variation. A main theme in the chapter is the interdependence and alignment of SweCcn and related resources, on the one hand in the local context, notably the infrastructure of Språkbanken (the Swedish language bank), and on the other hand with respect to corresponding resources for other languages. Of key concern is the relation to FrameNet, both the Swedish and other framenets, and a major section is devoted to conditions for linking constructions and frames.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Constructicon site: the local context
- 2.1Språkbanken
- 2.2SweFN++ – a richly structured lexical macroresource for Swedish
- 2.2.1Results of the SweFN++ project: SweFN
- 2.2.2Results of the SweFN++ project: The lexical macroresource
- 2.2.3Results of the SweFN++ project: Karp
- 2.2.4Spinoff from the SweFN++ project: Korp
- 3.Building the constructicon
- 3.1Some brief notes on the constructicon entries
- 3.2Selection
- 3.2.1Collecting constructions out of authentic language use
- 3.2.2Collecting constructions from secondary sources
- 3.3Construction analyses
- 3.4Organizing the constructicon entries
- 4.Idealization and variation
- 4.1Descriptive adequacy: defining grammaticality or characterizing usage?
- 4.2Accounting for constructional variation
- 5.Constructions and frames
- 5.1Linking constructions and frames
- 5.2Frame-bearing constructions
- 5.2.1Argument structure constructions
- 5.2.2Formulas
- 5.2.3Grading constructions
- 5.2.4Figurative constructions/idioms
- 5.3Some non frame-bearing constructions
- 6.Description format
- 6.1General description
- 6.1.1Name and illustration
- 6.1.2Definition
- 6.1.3Structure sketch
- 6.1.4Authentic examples
- 6.2Elaborating the description
- 6.2.1Category
- 6.2.2Construction elements
- 6.2.3Type
- 6.2.4Keywords and common words
- 6.3Relating and commenting on the constructions
- 6.3.1Inheritance
- 6.3.2Frame and Berkeley ID
- 6.3.3Comment and reference
- 6.1General description
- 7.Using the constructicon
- 7.1Interface
- 7.2On potential applications
- 8.Discussion and outlook
- 8.1Relations between constructicon and FrameNet
- 8.2From construction dictionary to construction network
Acknowledgments Notes References
References (90)
Abrahamsson, N., & Hyltenstam, K. (2009). Age of Onset and Nativelikeness in a Second Language: Listener Perception versus Linguistic Scrutiny. Language Learning, 59(2), 249–306.
Ahlberg, M., Forsberg M., & Hulden, M. (2014). Semi-supervised learning of morphological paradigms and lexicons. In Proceedings of EACL 2014 (pp.569–578). Gothenburg: ACL.
Allén, S. (1970). Vocabulary data processing. In H. Benediktsson (Ed.), The Nordic languages and modern linguistics: Proceedings of the International conference of Nordic and general linguistics (pp.235–261). Reykjavík: Visindafélag íslendinga.
Andersson, P. & Ahlberg, M. (2013). Towards automatic tracking of lexical change: linking historical lexical resources. In Proceedings of the workshop on computational historical linguistics at NODALIDA 2013. Oslo: NEALT.
Atkins, B. T. S., & Rundell, M. (2008). The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Bäckström, L., Borin, L., Forsberg, M., Lyngfelt, B., Prentice, J., & Sköldberg, E. (2013). Automatic identification of construction candidates for a Swedish constructicon. In Proceedings of the workshop on lexical semantic resources for NLP at NODALIDA 2013 (pp.2–11). Oslo: NEALT.
Bäckström, L., Lyngfelt, B., & Sköldberg, E. (2014). Towards Interlingual Constructicography. On correspondence between constructicon resources for English and Swedish. Constructions and Frames, 6(1), 9–32.
Bergen, B., & N. Chang (2013). Embodied Construction Grammar. In Th. Hoffmann, & G. Trousdale (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar (pp.168–190). Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Blensenius, K. (2015). Progressive constructions in Swedish. (Doctoral dissertation). Dept. of Swedish, University of Gothenburg.
Boas, H. C. (2009). Semantic frames as interlingual representations for multilingual databases. In H. C. Boas (Ed.), Multilingual FrameNets in Computational Lexicography: Methods and Applications (pp.59–100). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
(Ed.). (2010). Contrastive Studies in Construction Grammar. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Borin, L. (2010). Med Zipf mot framtiden – en integrerad lexikonresurs för svensk språkteknologi [‘With Zipf towards the future – an integrated lexical resource for Swedish language technology’]. LexicoNordica, 17, 35–54.
(2012). Core vocabulary: A useful but mystical concept in some kinds of linguistics. In D. Santos, K. Lindén, & W. Ng’ang’a (Eds.), Shall we play the Festschrift game? Essays on the occasion of Lauri Carlson’s 60th birthday (pp.53–65). Berlin: Springer.
Borin, L., Allwood, J., & de Melo, G. (2014). Bring vs. MTRoget: Evaluating automatic thesaurus translation. In Proceedings of LREC 2014 (pp.2115–2121). Reykjavík: ELRA.
Borin, L., Comrie, B., & Saxena, A. (2013). The Intercontinental Dictionary Series – a rich and principled database for language comparison. In L. Borin & A. Saxena (Eds.), Approaches to measuring linguistic differences (pp.285–302). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Borin, L., Dannélls, D., Forsberg, M., & McCrae, J. P. (2014). Representing Swedish lexical resources in RDF with lemon. In
Proceedings of the ISWC 2014 Posters & Demonstrations Track a track within the 13th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2014) (pp.329–332).
Borin, L., Dannélls, D., Forsberg, M., Toporowska Gronostaj, M., & Kokkinakis, D. (2010). The past meets the present in Swedish FrameNet++. In 14th EURALEX International Congress (pp.269–281). Ljouwert: Fryske Akademy.
Borin, L., & Forsberg, M. (2009). Something old, something new: A computational morphological description of Old Swedish. In LREC 2008 workshop on language technology for cultural heritage data (LaTeCH 2008) (pp.9–16). Marrakech: ELRA.
(2011). A diachronic computational lexical resource for 800 years of Swedish. In C. Sporleder, A. van den Bosch, & K. Zervanou (Eds.), Language technology for cultural heritage (pp.41–61). Berlin: Springer.
(2014). Swesaurus; or, The Frankenstein approach to wordnet construction. In Proceedings of the Seventh GlobalWordNet Conference (GWC 2014) (pp.315–223). Tartu: GWA.
Borin, L., Forsberg, M., & Lönngren, L. (2013). Saldo: a touch of yin to WordNet’s yang. Language Resources and Evaluation, 47(4), 1191–1211.
Borin, L., Forsberg, M., & Lyngfelt, B. (2013). Close encounters of the fifth kind: Some linguistic and computational aspects of the Swedish FrameNet++ project. Veredas, 17(1), 28–43.
Borin, L., Forsberg, M., Olsson, L. -J., Olsson, O.; & Uppström, J. (2013). The lexical editing system of Karp. In Proceedings of the eLex 2013 Conference (pp.503–516). Tallin: Eesti Keele Instituut.
Borin, L., Forsberg, M., Olsson, L. -J., & Uppström, J. (2012). The open lexical infrastructure of Språkbanken. In Proceedings of LREC 2012 (pp.3598–3602). Istanbul: ELRA.
Borin, L., Forsberg, M., & Roxendal, J. (2012). Korp – the corpus infrastructure of Språkbanken. In Proceedings of LREC 2012 (pp.474–478). Istanbul: ELRA
Borin, L., Nieto Piña, L., & Johansson, R. 2015. Here be dragons? The perils and promises of inter-resource lexical-semantic mapping. Semantic resources and semantic annotation for Natural Language Processing and the Digital Humanities. Workshop at NODALIDA, May 11, 13–18 2015 (pp.1–11). Vilnius. Linköping: Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings.
Croft, W. (2001). Radical Construction Grammar. Syntactic theory in typological perspective. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Dooley, S. (2014). The Swedish Comparative Correlative Construction: Ju … Desto … and Variations. Constructions 2014(4).
Ehrlemark, A. (2014). Ramar och konstruktioner – en kärlekshistoria [‘Frames and constructions – a love story’]. (GU-ISS 2014-01) Dept. of Swedish, University of Gothenburg.
Fanselow, G., Féry, C., Vogel, R., & Schlesewsky, M. (Eds.). (2006). Gradience in Grammar: Generative perspectives. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Fillmore, C. J. (1988). The mechanisms of ‘Construction Grammar’. Berkeley Linguistic Society, 14, 35–55.
(2003). Form and Meaning in Language: Volume 1, Papers on semantic roles. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
(2008). Border Conflicts: FrameNet Meets Construction Grammar. In E. Bernal, & J. DeCesaris (Eds.), Proceedings of the XIII EURALEX International Congress (pp.49–68). Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Fillmore, C. J., & Kay, P. (1996). Construction Grammar Coursebook. Manuscript. Dept. of linguistics, University of California, Berkeley.
Fillmore, C. J., Kay, P., & O’Connor, M. C. (1988). Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions. The case of let alone
. Language, 64, 501–538.
Fillmore, C. J., Lee-Goldman, R., & Rhomieux, R. (2012). The FrameNet Constructicon. In H. C. Boas, & I. A. Sag (Eds.), Sign-Based Construction Grammar (pp.309–372). Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Forsberg, M., Johansson, R., Bäckström, L., Borin, L., Lyngfelt, B., Olofsson, J., & Prentice, J. (2014). From construction candidates to constructicon entries. An experiment using semi-automatic methods for identifying constructions in corpora. Constructions and Frames, 6(1), 113–134.
FrameNet. <[URL]>
Friberg Heppin, K., & Toporowska Gronostaj, M. (2014). Exploiting FrameNet for Swedish: Mismatch? Constructions and Frames, 6(1), 52–72.
Goldberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions. A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
(2003). Constructions: A new theoretical approach to language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(5), 219–224.
(2013). Constructionist Approaches. In Th. Hoffmann, & G. Trousdale (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar (pp.15–31). Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Grūzītis, N., Dannélls, D., Lyngfelt, B., & Ranta, A. (2015). Formalising the Swedish Constructicon in Grammatical Framework. In Proceedings of the Grammar Engineering Across Frameworks (GEAF) 2015 Workshop, (pp.49–56). Beijing, China.
Hilpert, M. (2015). From hand-carved to computer-based: Noun-participle compounding and the upward strengthening hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics, 26, 113–147.
Hoffmann, Th. & Trousdale, G. (Eds.). (2013). The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Hovmark, H. (2012). Betydningsbeskrivelse og prototypteori [‘Meaning description and prototype theory’]. LexicoNordica, 19, 59–78.
ISO 2008. Language resource management – Lexical markup framework (LMF). International Standard ISO 24613:2008.
Jurafsky, D. (1991). An On-line Computational Model of Human Sentence Interpretation: A Theory of the Representation and Use of Linguistic Knowledge. (Doctoral dissertation). Dept. of Electrical engineering and computer sciences, University of California, Berkeley.
Kay, P. (2013). The Limits of (Construction) Grammar. In Th. Hoffmann, & G. Trousdale (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar (pp.32–48). Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Kay, P. & Fillmore, C. J. (1999). Grammatical constructions and linguistic generalizations. The What’s X doing Y? construction. Language, 75, 1–34.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Langacker, R. W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Theoretical Prerequisites (Vol. 1). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Lau, J. H., Clark, A., & Lappin, S. (2014). Measuring Gradience in Speakers’ Grammaticality Judgements. In Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp.821–826).
Lindström, J. & Linell, P. (2007). Roli å roli. X-och-x som samtalspraktik och grammatisk konstruktion [‘Fun ‘n fun. X-and-x as conversational practice and grammatical construction’]. In E. Engdahl, & A. -M. Londen (Eds.), Interaktion och kontext (pp.19–89). Lund: Studentlitteratur.
Linell, P. & Norén, K. (2009). Vågar vågar ni väl men … – en reaktiv konstruktion i svenskan [’Dare dare you, but … – a reactive construction in Swedish’]. Språk och stil, 19, 72–104.
Loenheim, L., Lyngfelt, B., Olofsson, J., Prentice, J., & Tingsell, S. (2016). Constructicography meets (second) language education. On constructions in teaching aids and the usefulness of a Swedish constructicon. In S. de Knop, & G. Gilquin (Eds.), Applied Construction Grammar (pp.327–355). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Lyngfelt, B. (2007). Mellan polerna. Reflexiv- och deponenskonstruktioner i svenskan [‘Between the poles. Reflexive and deponent constructions in Swedish’]. Språk och Stil, 17, 86–134.
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.
Lyngfelt, B, Magnusson Petzell, E., & Wide, C. (2017). Forskning om språksystemet – olika traditioner med olika syften [‘Grammatical research – different traditions with different purposes’] In D. Håkansson, & A. -M. Karlsson (Eds.), Varför språkvetenskap? (pp.129–152). Lund: Studentlitteratur.
Lyngfelt, B., & Sköldberg, E. (2013). Lexikon och konstruktikon – ett konstruktionsgrammatiskt perspektiv på lexikografi [‘Lexicon and constructicon – a constructionist perspective on lexicography’]. LexicoNordica, 20, 75–91.
Ohara K. H. (2014). Relating Frames and Constructions in Japanese FrameNet. In Proceedings of LREC 2014 (pp.2474–2477). Reykjavík: ELRA.
Pedersen, B., Borin, L., Forsberg, M., Kahusk, N., Lindén, K., Niemi, J., Nisbeth, N., Nygaard, L., Orav, H., Rögnvaldsson, E., Seaton, M., Vider, K., & Voionmaa, K. (2013). Nordic and Baltic wordnets aligned and compared through “WordTies”. In Proceedings of NODALIDA 2013 (pp.147–162). Oslo: NEALT.
Petruck, M. R. L. & Ziem, A. (2014). Semantic Relations for Frames and Constructions: Perspective_on. Talk at the 8th International Conference on Construction Grammar (ICCG-8). September 3–6, 2014. Osnabrück University.
Pollard, C. & Sag, I. A. (1994). Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ranta, A. (2011). Grammatical Framework. Programming with Multilingual Grammars. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
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]
Ruppenhofer, J. & Michaelis, L. A. (2010). A Constructional Account of Genre-Based Argument Omissions. Constructions and Frames, 2(2), 158–184.
Rydstedt, R. (2012). En matchningsdriven semantisk modell. Mellan ordboken och den interna grammatiken [‘A match-driven semantic model. Between the dictionary and the internal grammar’]. (Doctoral Dissertation). (GNS 19). Dept. of Swedish, University of Gothenburg.
Sag, I. A. (2012). Sign-Based Construction Grammar: An Informal Synopsis. In H. C. Boas, & I. A. Sag (Eds.), Sign-Based Construction Grammar (pp.39–170). Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Sag, I. A., Baldwin, T., Bond, F., Copestake, A., & Flickinger, D. (2002). Multi-word expressions: A pain in the neck for NLP. In A. Gelbukh (Ed.), Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. Proceedings of CICLING-2002 (pp.1–15). Berlin: Springer.
Sjögreen, C. (2015). Kasta bort bollen och äta bort sin huvudvärk. En studie av argumentstrukturen i kausativa bort-konstruktioner [‘The argument structure of Swedish causative bort-constructions’]. (Doctoral dissertation.) Dept. of Scandinavian Languages, Uppsala University.
Sköldberg, E., Bäckström, L., Borin, L., Forsberg, M., Lyngfelt, B., Olsson, L. -J., Prentice, J. R., R. Rydstedt, S. Tingsell, & J. Uppström, (2013). Between Grammars and Dictionaries: a Swedish Constructicon. In Proceedings of eLex 2013 (pp.310–327). Tallinn: Eesti Keele Instituut.
Steels, L. (2013). Fluid construction Grammar. In Th. Hoffmann, & G. Trousdale (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar (pp.153–167). Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Stefanowitsch, A. (2013). Collostructional Analysis. In Th. Hoffmann, & G. Trousdale (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar (pp.290–306). Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Svensén, B. (2009). A Handbook of Lexicography. The Theory and Practice of Dictionary-Making. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.
Teleman, U., Hellberg, S., & Andersson, E. (1999). Svenska Akademiens grammatik [‘The Swedish Academy Grammar’]. Stockholm: Norstedts.
Torrent, T. T., Lage, L. M., Sampaio, T. F., da Silva Tavares, T., & da Silva Matos, E. E. (2014). Revisiting border conflicts between FrameNet and Construction Grammar: Annotation policies for the Brazilian Portuguese Constructicon. Constructions and Frames, 6(1), 33–50.
van Trijp, R., & Steels, L. (2012). Multilevel alignment maintains language systematicity. Advances in Complex Systems 15(3–4), 1–30.
Van de Velde, F. (2012). Degeneracy: The maintenance of constructional networks. Leuven Working Papers in Linguistics 1(2), 24–61.
Cited by (18)
Cited by 18 other publications
Boas, Hans C, Josef Ruppenhofer & Collin F Baker
Boas, Hans C.
Borin, Lars & Benjamin Lyngfelt
Lyngfelt, Benjamin, Julia Prentice & Azizah Lenté Degez
Madabushi, Harish Tayyar, Laurence Romain, Petar Milin & Dagmar Divjak
Boas, Hans C, Josef Ruppenhofer & Collin Baker
van Trijp, Remi
Coussé, Evie, Steffen Höder, Benjamin Lyngfelt & Julia Prentice
2023. Introduction. In Constructional Approaches to Nordic Languages [Constructional Approaches to Language, 37], ► pp. 1 ff.
Czulo, Oliver, Alexander Willich, Alexander Ziem & Tiago T. Torrent
2023. A multilingual approach to the interaction between frames and constructions. Constructions and Frames 15:1 ► pp. 59 ff.
Patel, Malin, Armine Garibyan, Elodie Winckel & Stephanie Evert
Borin, Lars
2021. Multiword expressions – a tough typological nut for Swedish
FrameNet++. In The Swedish FrameNet++ [Natural Language Processing, 14], ► pp. 221 ff.
Borin, Lars, Dana Dannélls & Karin Friberg Heppin
Dannélls, Dana, Lars Borin, Markus Forsberg, Karin Friberg Heppin & Maria Toporowska Gronostaj
Prentice, Julia, Camilla Håkansson, Therese Lindström Tiedemann, Ildikó Pilán & Elena Volodina
2021. Language learning and teaching with Swedish FrameNet++. In The Swedish FrameNet++ [Natural Language Processing, 14], ► pp. 303 ff.
Herbst, Thomas
2020. Constructions, generalizations, and the unpredictability of language. Constructions and Frames 12:1 ► pp. 56 ff.
Herbst, Thomas
2022. Constructions, generalizations, and the unpredictability of language. In Construction Grammar across Borders [Benjamins Current Topics, 122], ► pp. 55 ff.
Janda, Laura A., Anna Endresen, Valentina Zhukova, Daria Mordashova & Ekaterina Rakhilina
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 december 2025. 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.
