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Constructions and Strategies in Universal Dependencies

Paper · 2025 · Joakim Nivre

Summary

This is a position paper. The author examines whether the Universal Dependencies (UD) annotation scheme is compatible with data from linguistic typology. As a reference point, he takes William Croft's book "Morphosyntax" (2022). Croft distinguishes between constructions and strategies. Constructions are universal units defined solely by function. Strategies are formal means of expressing such a function that can be recognized across languages. Nivre shows that the basic units of UD (nominals, modifiers, clauses) correspond almost exactly to Croft's three propositional acts: reference, modification, and predication. Moreover, UD gives priority to direct relations between content words and therefore often reveals a shared construction even in languages with different strategies. However, there are cases where UD trees fail entirely to capture this parallelism. It is not yet known which situation is more common. The author therefore proposes a research program: to create a constructicon for UD, that is, a systematic description of constructions, their strategies, and the corresponding annotations. Such a resource could improve cross-linguistic consistency among treebanks and thus make UD more suitable for comparative research.

Key points

  • The paper is based on UD v2.15 (November 2024), with data for 168 languages. UD v1 had previously been analyzed from a typological perspective (Croft et al., 2017), and some of those proposals were incorporated into version 2.
  • Example of a predicate nominal ("Ivan is a dancer"). Russian uses a zero strategy: two nouns in the nominative case stand side by side without a copula. Swedish and English use a verbal copula. In UD, the shared construction is visible from the nsubj relation from the predicate noun, and the difference in strategies from the presence or absence of a cop (AUX) dependent.
  • Counterexample: predicative possession. In Finnish, the possessor appears in the adessive as an oblique phrase, the possessum is the subject, and the copula on stands between them. English uses the have-strategy: nsubj + obj with a lexical verb. The UD trees for these sentences share almost no elements.
  • UD is coarser than Croft's classification: one and the same structure can correspond to several constructions, for example predicational and equational ones ("Ivan is the winner").
  • The proposed UD constructicon has three components: an inventory of universal constructions; typical strategies for each of them; and a cross-linguistically valid UD analysis with examples from different languages for each construction–strategy pair. It is meant to complement the UD guidelines with a holistic, function-to-form (onomasiological) perspective.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 870 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Universal Dependencies · 184 works

Cite

Cite as Joakim Nivre. 2025. Constructions and Strategies in Universal Dependencies. Proceedings of the Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies (NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{nivre2025constructions,
  title = {{Constructions and Strategies in Universal Dependencies}},
  author = {Joakim Nivre},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies (NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025)},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.nodalida-1.45/}
}

References

11 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. William Croft. 2016. Comparative concepts and language-specific categories: Theory and practice. Linguistic Typology, 20(2):377–393. find
  2. William Croft. 2022. Morphosyntax: Constructions of the World’s Languages. Cambridge University Press. find
  3. William Croft, Dawn Nordquist, Katherine Looney, and Michael Regan. 2017. Linguistic typology meets Universal Dependencies. In Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT15), pages 63–75. find
  4. Martin Haspelmath. 2010. Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic studies. Language, 86:663–687. find
  5. Arthur Lorenzi, Peter Ljunglöf, Ben Lyngfelt, Tiago Timponi Torrent, William Croft, Alexander Ziem, Nina Böbel, Linnéa Bäckström, Peter Uhrig, and Ely A. Matos. MoCCA: A model of comparative concepts for aligning constructicons. In Proceedings of the 20th Joint ACL – ISO Workshop on Interoperable Se… find
  6. Marie de Marneffe, Christopher D. Manning, Joakim Nivre, and Daniel Zeman. 2021. Universal Dependencies. Computational Linguistics, 47:255–308.
  7. Joakim Nivre, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Filip Ginter, Yoav Goldberg, Jan Hajič, Christopher D. Manning, Ryan McDonald, Slav Petrov, Sampo Pyysalo, Natalia Silveira, Reut Tsarfaty, and Dan Zeman. 2016. Universal Dependencies v1: A multilingual treebank collection. In Proceedings of the 10th Inter…
  8. Joakim Nivre, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Filip Ginter, Jan Hajič, Christopher D. Manning, Sampo Pyysalo, Sebastian Schuster, Francis Tyers, and Dan Zeman. 2020. Universal Dependencies v2: An evergrowing multilingual treebank collection. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Langu…
  9. Leon Stassen. 1997. Intransitive Predication. Oxford University Press. find
  10. Leon Stassen. 2009. Predicative Possession. Oxford University Press. find
  11. Leonie Weissweiler, Nina Böbel, Kirian Guiller, Santiago Herrera, Wesley Scivetti, Arthur Lorenzi, Nurit Melnik, Archna Bhatia, Hinrich Schütze, Lori Levin, Amir Zeldes, Joakim Nivre, William Croft, and Nathan Schneider. 2024. UCxn: Typologically informed annotation of constructions atop Universal D… find

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