Constructions, Collocations, and Patterns: Alternative Ways of Construction Identification in a Usage-based, Corpus-driven Theoretical Framework

Gábor Simon


Abstract
There is a serious theoretical and methodological dilemma in usage-based construction grammar: how to identify constructions based on corpus pattern analysis. The present paper provides an overview of this dilemma, focusing on argument structure constructions (ASCs) in general. It seeks to answer the question of how a data-driven construction grammatical description can be built on the collocation data extracted from corpora. The study is of meta-scientific interest: it compares theoretical proposals in construction grammar regarding how they handle co-occurrences emerging from a corpus. Discussing alternative bottom-up approaches to the notion of construction, the paper concludes that there is no one-to-one correspondence between corpus patterns and constructions. Therefore, a careful analysis of the former can empirically ground both the identification and the description of constructions.
Anthology ID:
2023.cxgsnlp-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Construction Grammars and NLP (CxGs+NLP, GURT/SyntaxFest 2023)
Month:
March
Year:
2023
Address:
Washington, D.C.
Editors:
Claire Bonial, Harish Tayyar Madabushi
Venues:
CxGsNLP | SyntaxFest
SIG:
SIGPARSE
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12–20
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.cxgsnlp-1.2
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gábor Simon. 2023. Constructions, Collocations, and Patterns: Alternative Ways of Construction Identification in a Usage-based, Corpus-driven Theoretical Framework. In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Construction Grammars and NLP (CxGs+NLP, GURT/SyntaxFest 2023), pages 12–20, Washington, D.C.. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Constructions, Collocations, and Patterns: Alternative Ways of Construction Identification in a Usage-based, Corpus-driven Theoretical Framework (Simon, CxGsNLP-SyntaxFest 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.cxgsnlp-1.2.pdf