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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. 255–302

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Chapter 9
Aligning constructicons across languages

A trilingual comparison between English, Swedish, and Brazilian Portuguese

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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 17 July 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.22.09lyn
Abstract
This chapter addresses interlingual relations between constructions. The perspective is contrastive rather than typological, with an aim towards multilingual constructicon development. Building on previous work on the alignment of frame-based multilingual lexical databases, we explore possibilities and problems for multilingual constructicography. By comparing the dataset of Berkeley’s English constructicon to Brazilian Portuguese and Swedish, we discuss the alignment of constructicons vis á vis the existence of more or less equivalent constructions or the deployment of different linguistic strategies in different languages.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Contrastive construction grammar
    • 1.2Bilingual lexicography and equivalence
      • 1.2.1Lexicographic equivalence
      • 1.2.2Bilingual e-lexicography
      • 1.2.3Lexicography v. lexicology
    • 1.3Frame-based computational lexicography
  • 2.Comparing constructions across languages
    • 2.1A four step comparison
    • 2.2Methodological remarks
  • 3.Comparison of English, Swedish and Brazilian Portuguese constructions
    • 3.1Constructions with high equivalence
    • 3.2Constructions with low equivalence
    • 3.3Constructions with medium equivalence
  • 4.Prospects for multilingual constructicography
    • 4.1Computational alignment
      • 4.1.1Relations and constraints in FrameNet Brasil
    • 4.2Resources for human users
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
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