Form and Meaning Representation of Chinese Constructions
Fundamental Issues on Constructicography
abstract
This paper introduces a Chinese constructicon (CCL-CxnBank) and a corpus annotation platform for the description of actual usages of constructions in contexts. CCL-CxnBank is an online repository that contains more than 1,000 constructions, as well as the linguistic descriptions of their various features. Based on our practice of constructicography, we hold that constructions differ from phrases in that they are not recursive. We propose that the formal representation of a given construction should be linear, while its meaning should be represented through paraphrase templates and semantic frames. In the future, contextual features will be integrated to analyse the semantics of constructions.
Keywords: Chinese constructicon • Language engineering • Construction grammar • Constructicography • Form and meaning representation • Principle of compositionality