Date: Wednesday, 15 January 2025, 12:15 pm to 13:45 pm
Venue: C601, Bismarckstr. 1
About: This event is organized by the RTG Dimensions of Constructional Space.
Title: Network relations in the Swedish Constructicon
About the speaker: Benjamin Lyngfelt is a Professor of Swedish at the University of Gothenburg. His research focuses on grammar and grammatical theory, and the interplay between what is often treated as separate parts of the language, such as grammar and lexicon, or syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. In recent years, he has led the effort to develop a Swedish constructiCon, an online dictionary of grammatical constructions.
Abstract
One of the constituting ideas of Construction Grammar is the conception of language as a (cognitive) network of constructions. This paper is concerned with the endeavor of adapting this idea to applied practice in a reference constructicon database, in particular as implemented in the Swedish Constructicon (SweCcn). The first part of the talk will be a brief overview of how notions of construction networks have developed in the constructionist tradition since the 1980s. The second and main part of the talk will be a presentation of the network model of SweCcn. I will focus on relations between constructions, which are handled in terms of taxonomies and (horizontal) associations, but also address relations within constructions, as well as external relations to related units in other resources. If time allows, I will also briefly outline our syntax model, that is, how we treat the combination of constructions into (sentence) constructs, which is key to the overall coherence of the system.