Handling abstract constructions in a dictionary-based constructicon

Sass, Bálint and Dömötör, Éva and Indig, Balázs and Lagos Cortes, Mátyás Bence and Lipp, Veronika and Makrai, Márton and Pethő, Gergely (2025) Handling abstract constructions in a dictionary-based constructicon. In: Electronic lexicography in the 21st century (eLex 2025) Proceedings of the eLex 2025 conference. Lexical Computing CZ s.r.o., Brno, pp. 189-202.

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Abstract

Taking seriously the common construction grammar statement that “it’s constructions all the way down” (Goldberg, 2006: 18), the Hungarian Constructicon aims to encompass the widest possible range of constructions. As it is a dictionary-based constructicon, it naturally contains what a dictionary can provide — from morphemes to words, and to partially schematic multiword constructions containing open slots. What had been missing were the more schematic abstract constructions. In this paper, we have added some important constructions of this kind to the database of the constructicon as an experiment, and have enhanced the integrated analyzer tool to handle them appropriately. Now, the system has the machinery to recognize all types of constructions in text and display them to the user. Thanks to the integration of abstract constructions, it does not present constructions in isolation; it reveals the intertwined nature of them, their connections and interactions instead. This results in a fundamentally extended functionality compared to a dictionary. A case study in Section 5 demonstrates the capabilities of the system. The list of the integrated abstract constructions is far from complete, expanding it remains future work.

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