The Russian Constructicon is a free open-access electronic resource that offers a searchable database of Russian constructions. The new user interface of the Russian Constructicon is available at https://constructicon.github.io/russian/.
The current version of the database contains 2,265 constructions. The constructions are accompanied with thorough descriptions of their properties and illustrative corpus-based examples. Descriptions are provided by linguists and translated into English and Norwegian.
The Russian Constructicon is designed to be a useful research-based linguistic and pedagogical tool for both linguists and L2 learners of Russian. We collect multi-word constructions of a particular type, namely those constructions that have been termed “partially schematic” (Ehrlemark et al. 2018). Such constructions lie between the two extremes of fully idiomatic expressions on the one hand and fully compositional syntactic sequences on the other hand (Janda et al. 2018). These constructions are difficult to account for in terms of either lexicon or grammar alone. They have both open slots and constraints on the fillers.
For example, NP čto nado (lit. ‘NP what needs’, as in prazdnik čto nado ‘the holiday is super-duper’) is a construction that has an open slot for a noun phrase (NP) restricted to nouns signifying an event, an object, or a person that can be positively evaluated, and a fixed part čto nado.
Another example is the construction net-net da i VP-Perf (lit. ‘no-no and VP-Perf’) used for referring to irregular events, as in èto slovo net-net da i proskol’znet v razgovore ‘this word can sometimes appear in a conversation’.
Such constructions are more frequent than idioms and present L2 learners with a greater challenge: they are ubiquitous in spoken and written language, but underrepresented in descriptive grammars of Russian.The Russian Constructicon is designed for both linguists and L2 learners of Russian.
The Russian Constructicon is a learner’s Constructicon. The Russian Constructicon strategically targets those constructions that are most essential for learners of Russian. One can sort the constructions according to different levels of second language proficiency (CEFR levels A1 – C2).
The Russian Constructicon is a large-scale group project advanced by team members from two research institutions – UiT The Arctic University of Norway and National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow.
Building the Russian Constructicon was funded by SIU project “Constructing a Russian Constructicon” (NCM-RU-2016/10025) in 2016 and the TWIRLL project (Targeting Wordforms in Russian Language Learning, CPRU-2017/10027) in 2017-2020. See the home page of the CLEAR research group at UiT for more details.
