Konstruktsioonipõhine keelemudel ja sõnaraamatumudel
Some lexicographic implications of a construction-based model of language

Summary/Abstract: Construction-based theories of language are the result of the acknowledgement that idiosyncratic and idiomatic phenomena constitute an important part of linguistic knowledge and are often subject to partial regularities. Such phenomena pose problems for many alternative linguistic theories based on lexical projection and compositional semantics, as well as for certain important assumptions of lexicography. One of these is the assumption that distributional patterns divide words into a relatively small set of parts of speech so that the grammatical behaviour of words can be indexed in a dictionary with part of speech tags. Another assumption is that words are relatively automonous entities and thus that their meaning and behaviour in context is determined by their inherent semantic and combinatorial properties. The paper explores three types of phenomena that pose problems for current lexicographic practices based on these assumptions. The fi rst of these is the exceptional syntactic behaviour of words or word forms that have become entrenched in an idiosyncratic pattern which cannot be described in terms of parts of speech, the second is construction-specifi c meaning, and the third is idiosyncratic behaviour and/or construction-specifi c meaning acquired by words or word forms in a productive construction. It is proposed that the occurrence of the head word or some of its forms in a construction in which it displays idiosyncratic behaviour and/or constructionspecifi c meaning should be described in a separate structural unit in the dictionary article, similarly to its occurrence in a phraseological unit. It is argued that omitting information about constructions or confl ating it with information about the inherent semantic and grammatical properties of the head word would be misleading, especially in learners’ dictionaries. The possibility to describe constructions in a dictionary is however limited, as is illustrated by the third phenomenon examined in the paper: productive constructions that contain no fi xed lexical material can only be represented in an eventual “constructicon” complementing the lexicon and the traditional grammar.

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