construction (cxn)

Type construction
Definition the basic unit of morphosyntactic analysis; a construction is a conventional pairing of form and function -- its form is morphosyntactic structure, and its function is a combination of meaning (semantic content) and information packaging (Section 1.1). When combined with a modifier describing a specific construction, [Modifier] construction refers to any pairing of form and function in a language (or any language) used to express a particular combination of semantic content and information packaging denoted by the modifier of construction (Section 1.4). Example: the numeral modification construction exemplified by three tree-s consists of a form which: (i) can be described schematically as [Num Noun-number]; (ii) performs the function of referring to a group of objects of the type denoted by the noun (tree), and modifying that information with the additional information that the cardinality of the group is the amount denoted by the number (three). Specific constructions (a.k.a. criteria, tests, evidence) are used to define word classes. (Section 1.2.3)
See section (in Croft 2022) 1.2.3

Source

The Model of Comparative concepts for Constructicon Alignment (MoCCA; Lorenzi et al. 2024) proposes to connect constructions across and within languages using Comparative Concepts as a shared base of comparison. It adopts the set of Comparative Concepts provided by Croft (2022).

Croft, William. 2022. Morphosyntax: Constructions of the World’s Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/highereducation/books/morphosyntax/1AAB4F5F9C553F675170DCA3F03F82E2#contents. (14 October, 2025).
Lorenzi, Arthur, Peter Ljunglöf, Ben Lyngfelt, Tiago Timponi Torrent, William Croft, Alexander Ziem, Nina Böbel, Linnéa Bäckström, Peter Uhrig & Ely E Matos. 2024. MoCCA: A Model of Comparative Concepts for Aligning Constructicons. In Proceedings of the 20th Joint ACL - ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation @ LREC-COLING 2024, 93–98. Torino, Italia: ELRA and ICCL. https://aclanthology.org/2024.isa-1.12/. (22 July, 2025).

You can consult this entry in the original database here.

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