<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<p>Construction Grammar (CxG) is an innovative approach to language that has become increasingly popular in the Anglosphere over the last 30 years. In CxG, the basic units of linguistic analysis are constructions: arbitrary and conventional form-meaning pairings, reminiscent of Saussure’s linguistic sign, but applied to levels of linguistic analysis beyond the lexicon. A large body of research has provided ample evidence in support of CxG. However, the theory remains unknown to many colleagues outside the Anglosphere.</p>
<p>In this paper, I highlight a particularly interesting strand of CxG that is referred to as ‘usage-based’, an approach that assumes constructions are learned based on input frequency, that is, through repeated exposure to and use of a linguistic structure (hence <italic>usage-</italic>based). The main aim of this paper is thus to demonstrate how corpus data can be analyzed to find evidence for ‘entrenchment’ of linguistic structures and thus, the existence of constructions. I will illustrate this procedure by applying so-called covarying-collexeme analyses to data from the Slovak National Corpus (SNC) and the Slovak Web 2011 corpus from which I extracted 785 tokens of the so-called Comparative Correlative (CC) construction (e.g. <italic>Čím viac čítam, tým viac rozumiem).</italic></p>
</abstract>

Construction Grammar (CxG) is an innovative approach to language that has become increasingly popular in the Anglosphere over the last 30 years. In CxG, the basic units of linguistic analysis are constructions: arbitrary and conventional form-meaning pairings, reminiscent of Saussure’s linguistic sign, but applied to levels of linguistic analysis beyond the lexicon. A large body of research has provided ample evidence in support of CxG. However, the theory remains unknown to many colleagues outside the Anglosphere.
In this paper, I highlight a particularly interesting strand of CxG that is referred to as ‘usage-based’, an approach that assumes constructions are learned based on input frequency, that is, through repeated exposure to and use of a linguistic structure (hence usage-based). The main aim of this paper is thus to demonstrate how corpus data can be analyzed to find evidence for ‘entrenchment’ of linguistic structures and thus, the existence of constructions. I will illustrate this procedure by applying so-called covarying-collexeme analyses to data from the Slovak National Corpus (SNC) and the Slovak Web 2011 corpus from which I extracted 785 tokens of the so-called Comparative Correlative (CC) construction (e.g. Čím viac čítam, tým viac rozumiem).

From Corpus Data to Constructional Networks: Analyzing Language with the Usage-Based Construction Grammar Framework

Ľudovít Štúr Institute of Linguistics

Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt

Journal of Linguistics/Jazykovedný casopis

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Construction Grammar (CxG) is an innovative approach to language that has become increasingly popular in the Anglosphere over the last 30 years. In CxG, the...

From Corpus Data to Constructional Networks: Analyzing Language with the Usage-Based Construction Grammar Framework

Published Online: Mar 30, 2024

Page range: 701 - 740

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jazcas-2024-0019

Keywords
Usage-based Construction Grammar, Comparative Correlative, Slovak, meso-construction, mental network

© 2024 Jakob Horsch, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

From Corpus Data to Constructional Networks: Analyzing Language with the Usage-Based Construction Grammar Framework

Published Online: Mar 30, 2024

Page range: 701 - 740

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jazcas-2024-0019

KeywordsUsage-based Construction Grammar, Comparative Correlative, Slovak, meso-construction, mental network

© 2024 Jakob Horsch, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Keywords
Usage-based Construction Grammar, Comparative Correlative, Slovak, meso-construction, mental network