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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

Chapter 9
Aligning constructicons across languages

A trilingual comparison between English, Swedish, and Brazilian Portuguese

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.

Keywords: constructicon, construction, construction grammar, lexicography, constructicography, contrastive, bilingual, multilingual, English, Swedish, Brazilian Portuguese
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
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 [email protected].

Published online: 17 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.22.09lyn
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