The German Constructicon Project: Framework, methodology, resources

Abstract

Abstract The paper introduces aims and efforts of the German Constructicon Project (GCP) (www.german-constructicon.de) hosted at the University of Düsseldorf. The ultimate goal of the project is not only to identify and describe oftentimes overlooked grammatical constructions, but also to offer comprehensive descriptions of them in a dictionary-like online repository. Each construction entry is intended to provide all relevant grammatical information necessary to understand and correctly use the respective grammatical construction. Based on constructicographical analyses of authentic corpus examples, the paper reports on the methodological foundations of GCP, most importantly the annotation categories used, as well as on the computational work routine yielding construction entries. The routine includes five consecutive steps, (i) subcorporation and preliminary analysis, (ii) parsing pipeline (automatic annotations of part of speech, phrase type and grammatical function), (iii) semantic annotations, (iv) semi-automatic analyses of the annotations and, finally, (v) compilation of construction entries. For illustration, we present the geschweige denn (‘let alone’) construction in its habitat of the negating_connector construction family. The paper concludes with outlining a full-fledged construction entry for geschweige denn in the German Constructicon.