The FrameNet Constructicon

The Berkeley FrameNet Project1 has been engaged since 1997 in discovering and describing the semantic and distributional properties of words in the general vocabulary of English.2 Notions from FRAME SEMANTICS (see Fillmore and Baker 2009 and references therein) provide the basis of the semantic description of the lexical units in the database, and sentences extracted from the FrameNet (FN) text corpora3 serve as material for analysis and annotation. The goal is to describe the combinatorial properties of each word, both semantically and syntactically, as these properties are revealed in the corpora. The present chapter reviews some of the principles and displays some of the results of FrameNet’s lexical research but focuses on an appended project for recognizing and cataloguing GRAMMATICAL CONSTRUCTIONS in English. The registry of English constructions to be created by this secondary project—the Constructicon—will describe the grammatical characteristics and semantic import of each construction, and will link to each a collection of sample sentences that have been annotated to exhibit these characteristics, using tools developed for the earlier lexical work. While building a Constructicon has different goals from those of designing a construction-based grammar of the language, the intention is that each construction will be represented in a way compatible with the development of full grammar of the language of the sort presented elsewhere in this volume (see especially Sag this volume). In some cases we offer precise proposals for the treatment of a construction as it would appear in the grammar; in other cases the descriptions we present should be seen at least as organized observations about individual constructions, observations that need to be accounted for in a future complete grammar. In all cases we expect that the constructicon will contain useful information for advanced language pedagogy and that it will suggest new levels of expectation for parsing and other NLP activities. The main body of the finished Constructicon will display the properties of constructional phenomena in an abbreviated format, alongside of a representative sample of English sentences annotated to display the properties claimed for each construction. The annotation procedure follows a method of identifying and labeling phrases originally developed for FN’s lexicographic activities but adapted to indicate (1) the stretches of language that count as instances of given constructions (e.g. the phrase bracketed in { } in They