Towards an English constructicon using patterns and frames

Recent research in construction grammar has been marked by increasing efforts to create constructicons: detailed inventories of form-meaning pairs to describe the grammar of a given language, following the principles of construction grammar. This paper describes proposals for building a new constructicon of English, based on the combination of the COBUILD grammar patterns and the semantic frames of FrameNet. In this case study, the valency information from FrameNet was automatically matched to the verb patterns of COBUILD, in order to identify the frames that each pattern is associated with. We find that the automatic procedure must be complemented by a good deal of manual annotation. We examine the “V that” pattern in particular, illustrating how the frame information can be used to describe this pattern in terms of constructions.