Our project aims to build a comprehensive inventory of grammatical constructions of the English language (constructicon) collected by following the principles of Construction Grammar theory.
In construction grammar, all knowledge of a language is captured by a network of form-meaning pairs at any level of complexity and generality, including idiomatic expressions (e.g. give someone the creeps), verb-specific valency patterns (e.g. “NP give NP NP”), as well as fully abstract and general constructions (e.g. the double-object construction “NP V NP NP”). Even common syntactic patterns receive a constructional meaning defining what lexical items can be combined with them, and the semantic contribution that they make to the sentence.
Our project takes the COBUILD grammar patterns, also developed at the University of Birmingham, as its primary source of information about the possible syntactic constructions of English and the lexical items that can occur with them. The COBUILD patterns are described in terms of a hierarchy of constructions at varying levels of generality, paired with semantic descriptions that are derived from a combination of information from the semantic groups described in the COBUILD patterns themselves, the semantic database FrameNet, and our own semantic analysis.
External resources: https://englishconstructicon.bham.ac.uk/
Project team:
More information:
Email: f.b.perek@bham.ac.uk