Principal investigator: Anna Endresen
Project title: CLARUS – Constructional Landscape of Russian Syntax: Modeling native speakers’ knowledge for second language learners
Summary of the project:
The CLARUS project focuses on the syntactic level of Russian grammar and takes a constructionist usage-based approach to syntax. The project has three components that will provide empirical, theoretical, and pedagogical contribution accordingly.
The main objective of Component 1 is to build and calibrate the Russian Constructicon, a free open-access electronic resource that offers a searchable database of Russian constructions accompanied with thorough descriptions of their properties.
Component 2 entails exploration of the collected data on Russian constructions. In particular, it will study syntactic constructions from the perspective of aspect, the most pivotal and versatile category of Russian grammar.
Component 3 aims to create new research-based pedagogical materials for learners of elementary and intermediate Russian. In particular, the development of the Russian Constructicon will strategically target those constructions that are most essential for learners of Russian. The new pedagogical materials will be included in the Oahpa! learning platform, thus contributing to the on-going TWIRLL project (“Targeting Wordforms in Russian Language Learning”, 2017-2020) of the CLEAR group.
The work on the Learner’s Constructicon for Russian had started by the CLEAR group long before CLARUS (cf. Janda et al. 2018). The CLARUS project contributes to this work by regularizing the existing version of the database of Russian multi-word constructions and by supplying it with additional empirical linguistic material. In particular, the CLARUS project harmonizes the classification system employed in the Constructicon, investigates families and clusters of constructions, and carries out corpus data analyses in order to identify missing constructions and describe the semantic and syntactic constraints on their open slots.
Link to the project result:
- The Russian Constructicon – new interface is available at https://constructicon.github.io/russian/;
- https://www.youtube.com/@russianconstructicon7328
- Launch recording
Project duration: 2018 – 2022
Key publications:
Endresen, Anna, Valentina Zhukova, Daria Mordashova, Ekaterina Rakhilina, Olga Lyashevskaya. 2020. “Russkij konstruktikon: Novyj lingvističeskij resurs, ego ustrojstvo i specifika” [= The Russian Constructicon: A new linguistic resource, its design and key characteristics]. In: Computational linguistics and Intellectual Technologies. Papers from the Annual International Conference “Dialogue 2020“. Issue 19. ISSN 2075-7182. DOI: 10.28995/2075-7182-2020-19-241-255. Pp. 226-241.
Endresen, Anna and Laura A. Janda. 2020. “Taking Construction Grammar One Step Further: Families, Clusters, and Networks of Evaluative Constructions in Russian”. In Mike Putnam, Matthew Carlson, Antonio Fábregas, Eva Wittenberg (eds.) Defining Construction: Insights into the Emergence and Generation of Linguistic Representations (special issue of Frontiers in Psychology 11). pp. 1-22. ISSN 1664-1078. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.574353. Pp. 1-22.
Janda, Laura A., Anna Endresen, Valentina Zhukova, Daria Mordashova, Ekaterina Rakhilina. 2020. “How to build a constructicon in five years: The Russian Example”. In: Frank Brisard, Timothy Colleman, Astrid De Wit, Renata Enghels, Nikos Koutsoukos, Tanja Mortelmans, and María Sol Sansiñena (eds.) The Wealth and Breadth of Construction-Based Research [a thematic issue of Belgian Journal of Linguistics 34]. Pp. 162-175. https://benjamins.com/catalog/bjl.00043.jan
Janda, Laura A., Anna Endresen, Robert Reynolds. 2019. Aspectual opposition and rivalry in Russian are not discrete: New evidence from experimental data. In: Russian Linguistics: International Journal for the Study of Russian and other Slavic Languages 43(3), 249-271.
Endresen, Anna. 2019. Two origins of the prefix IZ- and how they affect the VY- vs. IZ- correlation in Modern Russian. Russian Linguistics: International Journal for the Study of Russian and other Slavic Languages 43(3). 205-229.
Key conference presentations:
Endresen, Anna, Anna Klezovich, Olga Lyashevskaya, Daria Mordashova, Maria Nordrum, Ekaterina Rakhilina, Francis Tyers, and Valentina Zhukova. 2019. “Building a Constructicon for Russian: How to identify families of constructions” Presented at the 15th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (ICLC-15). Kwansei Gakuin University, Nishinomiya, Japan, August 2019.
Endresen, Anna. 2019. “Nu rabota i rabota: Russian constructions with reduplication”. Presented at November Seminar of the Russian Faculty at UiT The Arctic University of Norway (Novemberseminaret i russisk 2019), November 29, 2019.
Endresen, Anna, Daria Mordashova, Valentina Zhukova, Ekaterina Rakhilina, Olga Lyashevskaya. 2020. “Русский Конструктикон: Новый лингвистический ресурс, его устройство и специфика” [= The Russian Constructicon: A new linguistic resource, its design and key characteristics], a talk presented over internet at the “Dialogue 2020: 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies“, June 17-19, 2020, Moscow. ppt; video
Endresen, Anna, Daria Mordashova, Valentina Zhukova, Laura A. Janda, Olga Lyashevskaya, Ekaterina Rakhilina. 2020. “Annotation of constructions in the light of strategies adopted in the Russian Constructicon: Challenges of accurate and user-friendly representations of semantic and syntactic properties.” Presented virtually at The Construction Annotation Workshop 2020. Follow-up session organized by Tiago Torrent, Alexander Ziem, Benjamin Lyngfelt. November 3, 2020.
Lyashevskaya, Olga, Daria Mordashova, Valentina Zhukova, Anna Endresen, Laura A. Janda, Ekaterina Rakhilina. 2020. “Core grammar, non-compositional, and discourse organisation constructions in the full-text construction annotation task for Russian”. Presented virtually at The Construction Annotation Workshop 2020. October 6 & 8, 2020. Abstract.
Endresen, Anna. 2020. “Typer av grammatiske konstruksjoner i det russiske konstruktikonet”. [= Types of grammatical constructions in the Russian Constructicon]. Presented virtually at the November seminar, UiT (Novemberseminaret i russisk og russlandstudier 2020). November 19, 2020.
Endresen, Anna, Valentina Zhukova, Daria Mordashova, Ekaterina Rakhilina. 2021. “Semantic classification of constructions in the Russian Constructicon”, presented virtually at the Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Conference (SCLC-2020/2021), June 3-6, 2021. Recording.
Janda, Laura A. and Anna Endresen. 2021. “Našli razvlečenie! Patterns of Assessment and Attitude constructions in Russian”, presented virtually at the Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Conference (SCLC-2020/2021), June 3-6, 2021. Recording.
Janda, Laura A., Anna Endresen, Tore Nesset. 2021. “Det russiske konstruktikonet: Hvordan vi bygger en database med syntaktiske konstruksjoner”. A talk presented virtually at NORKOG Sommerseminaret 2020/2021 / Summer Seminar 2020/2021 of the Norwegian Cognitive Linguistics Association (June 10-11, 2021), UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø.
Janda, Laura A., Anna Endresen, Ekaterina Rakhilina, Valentina Zhukova, and Daria Mordashova. Forthcoming. “How to build a constructicon in five years: The Russian recipe”. A talk accepted for 11th International Conference on Construction Grammar (ICCG11). University of Antwerp, Belgium, August 2021.
Mordashova, Daria, Anna Endresen, Valentina Zhukova, Laura A. Janda, Ekaterina Rakhilina. Forthcoming. “Prohibitive constructions in Russian: Families and clusters” A talk accepted for 11th International Conference on Construction Grammar (ICCG11). University of Antwerp, Belgium, August 2021.
