This paper reports on an effort to search for corresponding constructions in English and Japanese in a TED Talk parallel corpus, using frames-and-constructions analysis (Ohara, 2019; Ohara and Okubo, 2020; cf. Czulo, 2013, 2017). The purpose of the paper is two-fold: (1) to demonstrate the validity of frames-and-constructions analysis to search for corresponding constructions in typologically unrelated languages; and (2) to assess whether the “Do schools kill creativity?” TED Talk parallel corpus, annotated in various languages for Multilingual FrameNet, is a good starting place for building a multilingual constructicon. The analysis showed that similar to our previous findings involving texts in a Japanese to English bilingual children’s book, the TED Talk bilingual transcripts include pairs of constructions that share similar pragmatic functions. While the TED Talk parallel corpus constitutes a good resource for frame semantic annotation in multiple languages, it may not be the ideal place to start aligning constructions among typologically unrelated languages. Finally, this work shows that the proposed method, which focuses on heads of sentences, seems valid for searching for corresponding constructions in transcripts of spoken data, as well as in written data of typologically-unrelated languages.

Relations between frames and constructions must be made explicit in FrameNet-style linguistic resources such as Berkeley FrameNet (Fillmore & Baker, 2010, Fillmore, Lee-Goldman & Rhomieux, 2012), Japanese FrameNet (Ohara, 2013), and Swedish Constructicon (Lyngfelt et al., 2013). On the basis of analyses of Japanese constructions for the purpose of building a constructicon in the Japanese FrameNet project, this paper argues that constructions can be classified based on whether they evoke frames or not. By recognizing such a distinction among constructions, it becomes possible for FrameNet-style linguistic resources to have a proper division of labor between frame annotations and construction annotations. In addition to the three kinds of “meaningless” constructions which have been proposed already, this paper suggests there may be yet another subtype of constructions without meanings. Furthermore, the present paper adds support to the claim that there may be constructions without meanings (Fillmore, Lee-Goldman & Rhomieux, 2012) in a current debate concerning whether all constructions should be seen as meaning-bearing (Goldberg, 2006: 166-182).

Since 2008, the Japanese FrameNet (JFN, http://jfn.st.hc.keio.ac.jp/) project has been annotating the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ), the first such corpus, officially released in October 2011. This paper reports annotation results of the book genre of BCCWJ (Ohara 2011, Ohara, Saito, Fujii & Sato 2011). Comparing the semantic frames needed to annotate BCCWJ with those that the FrameNet (FN) project (Fillmore and Baker 2009, Fillmore 2006) already has defined revealed that: 1) differences in the Japanese and English semantic frames often concern different perspectives and different lexical aspects exhibited by the two lexicons; and 2) in most of the cases where JFN defined new semantic frame for a word, the frame did not involve culture-specific scenes. We investigated the extent to which existing semantic frames originally defined for analyzing English words were used, annotating 810 sentences of the so-called core data of the book genre of BCCWJ. In the 810 sentences we were able to assign semantic frames to approximately 4000 words, although we could not assign any to 587 words. That is, of all the LUs in the sentences, we were able to identify semantic frames to about 87 per cent of them. In other words, the semantic frames already defined in FN for English could be used for 87 per cent of the Japanese LUs.

This paper describes an ongoing project “Japanese FrameNet (JFN)”, a corpus-based lexicon of Japanese in the FrameNet style. This paper focuses on the set of software tools tailored for the JFN annotation process. As the first step in the annotation, annotators select target sentences from the JFN corpus using the JFN kwic search tool, where they can specify cooccurring words and/or the part of speech of collocates. Our search tool is capable of displaying the parsed tree of a target sentence and its neigbouring sentences. The JFN corpus mainly consists of balanced and copyright-free “Japanese Corpus” which is being built as a national project. After the sentence to be annotated is chosen, the annotator labels syntactic and semantic tags to the appropriate phrases in the sentence. This work is performed on an annotation platform called JFNDesktop, in which the functions of labeling assist and consistency checking of annotations are available. Preliminary evaluation of our platform shows such functions accelerate the annotation process.

This paper discusses findings of a frame-based contrastive text analysis, using the large-scale and precise descriptions of semantic frames provided by the FrameNet project (Baker, 2006; Fillmore, 2006). It points out that even though the existing FrameNet methodology allows us to compare languages at a more detailed level than previous studies (e.g. Talmy, 2003; Slobin, 2004), in order to investigate how different languages encode the same events, it is also necessary to make cross-references to grammatical constructions rather than limiting ourselves to analyzing the semantics of frame-bearing predicates. Based on a contrastive text analysis of an English-Japanese aligned parallel corpus and on the lexicon-building project of Japanese FrameNet (Ohara et al., 2006), the paper attempts to represent interactions between lexical units and constructions of Japanese sentences in terms of the combined lexicon and “constructicon”, currently being developed in FrameNet (Fillmore, 2006). By applying the idea to the analysis of Japanese in Japanese FrameNet, it is hoped that the study will give support to working out the details of the new FrameNet directions.