THE REPLECON DATABASE
Currently, linguistics has been increasingly investing in task-specific databases. The structures included therein are annotated for semantic, morphological, syntactic and other features depending on the purposes a particular database serves. Such databases are a valuable source of information both for linguists and advanced language learners.
Within our project, RepLeCon, a database of constructions with lexical repetitions, is being created. In contrast to the resouces already available (Зализняк 2016; Инькова 2017; Эндресен и др. 2020), RepLeCon is focused on a particular class of constructions, i.e. Russian constructions with repetitions of various types and their equivalents in English, Spanish, Italian, German and French. Contructions are understood as expressions such that “something about their form or meaning is not strictly predictable from the properties of their component parts” (Goldberg 1995: 4). Building on the achievements of the previously created resources (Lyngfelt et al. 2018; Janda et al. 2018; Loiseau et al. 2013; Бунтман и др. 2014; Зализняк и др. 2015; Инькова, Кружков 2016), we have developed a uniform array of parameters for characterising structures with lexical repetitions in the RepLeCon database.
Some constructions were annotated for additional parameters basing on the literature and on our own research within the project as well as on experimental work with native speakers (sample questionnaire).
The parallel corpora of the Russian National Corpus and OPUS (powered by SketchEngine) serve as our sources of data. Our choice of languages is based on the size of RNC’s parallel corpora and the skills of the project’s team.
There are currently 19 types of constructions with repetitions described in the database, totalling 2100 naturally occurring examples.
A database of temporal constructions with repetitions with 746 examples is available for download. The other databases will be available soon.