Projects

Our group serves as a hub for a diverse array of PhD projects, each delving into distinct facets of Construction Grammar theory. Here is but an example of the objectives we seek to pursue by means of our work:

• Addressing central theoretical questions in Construction Grammar, such as criteria for identifying constructions and establishing links between them
• Applying the framework to various languages (English, German, Polish, Ukrainian, Persian, Arabic, Haitian Creole, Italian, Spanish and Chinese), different historical stages and language contact situations
• Testing predictions derived from Construction Grammar using a variety of methods, including traditional and ‘big data’ corpus methods, behavioural experiments and neuroimaging techniques
• Developing an open-access database for the academic community in the form of a research constructicon that brings together and interconnects constructional descriptions as well as experimental results obtained in the various research projects on individual constructions and particular types of constructions

The researchers of the RTG are currently working on the following projects:

• Project 1: Corpus evidence for delineating constructions
• Project 2: Multimodal constructional space
• Project 3: Form and meaning as factors in the identification and learning of constructional slots – English phrasal verbs and verb-preposition combinations
• Project 4: Representation and processing of constructions in the brain
• Project 5: Representation and acquisition of agreement relations in a usage-based framework
• Project 6: Representation and acquisition of idiomatic constructions in L1 and L2 learners
• Project 7: Artificial language learning as a window to the early entrenchment of constructions
• Project 8: German verbs with particles or prefixes in language change: Form, meaning, and syntax
• Project 9: Functions and cognitive semantics of prepositions in complex constructions
• Project 10: Argument structure constructions with prepositions and phrasal verbs in Arabic and other Semitic languages
• Project 11: Constructions beyond the sentence: text-structuring in (esp.) sixteenth-century historiographical texts
• Project 12: Semantically related argument structures in the history of English
• Project 13: Multifunctionality in Haitian Creole: New insights from a Construction Grammar perspective