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A Linguistic Ontology for Constructicography: The Research Constructicon and its Ontology Modules

Summary

Research in Construction Grammar (CxG) is mostly scattered across individual publications, and existing constructicons such as FKD or the English CASA Constructicon act mainly as descriptive references. The authors present the Research Constructicon (RCxn), built within the DFG-funded Research Training Group Dimensions of Constructional Space. It is a community-driven platform that records constructions together with the research done on them.

The project has three parts: an ontology, an RDF database filled by contributing researchers, and a web application for browsing the data. This paper concentrates on the ontology. The authors argue that knowledge graphs suit CxG well because they can represent both the internal structure of a construction and the links between constructions, following Diessel's "sign as a network" and "network of signs". The ontology is modular, follows RDF/OWL standards and reuses existing vocabularies such as OLiA and FOAF.

Its design grew bottom-up from the needs of PhD projects, including cross-linguistic idiom comparison, multimodal constructions involving gesture, and corpus-based colloprofiles. The result is a reusable, interoperable model that other constructicon projects could adopt.

Key points

  • The database currently holds contributions from 13 researchers, and the goal is to reach at least 30 contributors before 2027 ends. The web app is live at bdlweb.phil.uni-erlangen.de/RCxn.
  • Requirements came from close to 30 completed and ongoing PhD projects. Examples include:
    • linking idioms across English, Persian and German by degree of formal and functional similarity;
    • modelling gesture in constructions such as "This close to V-ing", where gesture cannot be treated as an ordinary element;
    • storing and visualizing colloprofiles.
  • The ontology is written in RDF/OWL, reuses OLiA and FOAF, and was developed iteratively alongside the database and frontend.
  • Besides the core modules, there are auxiliary modules: a Language module (lg.rdf) and a CASA module (casa.rdf) for collaboration with the English CASA Constructicon. Both are available on GitHub.
  • Funding comes from the DFG (project no. 468527017). Resources and IRIs will stay hosted on the FAU server, and the ontology remains open for community use and extension.

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: Natural language processing

Topics Knowledge graphs & ontologies

 Institutions

🎓Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-NürnbergErlangen · Germany2 works · 11 citations

Cite

Cite as Elodie Winckel, Peter Uhrig and Stephanie Evert. 2026. A Linguistic Ontology for Constructicography: The Research Constructicon and its Ontology Modules. Proceedings of 10th Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics (LDL-2026).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/2nov6en9xhep

@inproceedings{winckel2026linguistic,
  title = {{A Linguistic Ontology for Constructicography: The Research Constructicon and its Ontology Modules}},
  author = {Elodie Winckel, Peter Uhrig and Stephanie Evert},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of 10th Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics (LDL-2026)},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/2nov6en9xhep},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2nov6en9xhep}
}

References

20 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Kardelen Babal. 2026. ‘Konstruktion: Intensivierung_Attribut_nachgestellt:NP_pur’ in FrameNet-Konstruktikon des Deutschen. https://framenet-constructicon.hhu.de/ constructicon/construction?id=1323 (accessed 19.02.2026). ↗
  2. Christian Chiarcos and Maria Sukhareva. 2015. OLiA – Ontologies of Linguistic Annotation. Semantic Web, 6(4):379–386. find
  3. William Croft. 2022. Morphosyntax: Constructions of the World’s Languages. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. find
  4. Chiarcos, Christian and Adam, Angelika and Hellmann, Sebastian and Sukhareva, Maria and Fäth, Christian and Abromeit, Frank and Ionov, Maxim and Dimitrova, Vanya. Ontologies of Linguistic Annotation (OLiA). Applied Computational Linguistics (ACoLi) Lab at the Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. find
  5. Holger Diessel. 2019. The Grammar Network: How Linguistic Structure Is Shaped by Language Use. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. find
  6. Chiarcos, Christian and Fäth, Christian and Ionov, Maxim. 2020. The ACoLi Dictionary Graph. European Language Resources Association. find
  7. Holger Diessel. 2023. The Constructicon: Taxonomies and Networks. Elements in Construction Grammar. find
  8. DELPH-IN Consortium. DELPH-IN: Deep Linguistic Processing with HPSG. find
  9. William Croft. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford University Press, Oxford. find
  10. Scott Farrar and D. Terence Langendoen. 2010. General Ontology for Linguistic Description. Institute for Language Information and Technology. find
  11. Adele E. Goldberg. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. University of Chicago Press. find
  12. FKD. FrameNet-Konstruktikon des Deutschen. https://framenet-constructicon.hhu.de (accessed 19.02.2026). ↗
  13. Thomas Herbst and Thomas Hoffmann. 2024. A Construction Grammar of the English Language: CASA – a Constructionist Approach to Syntactic Analysis. John Benjamins Publishing Company. find
  14. Herbst, Thomas and Hoffmann, Thomas and Uhrig, Peter and Garibyan, Armine and Evert, Stephanie. 2023–. CASA ConstructiCon of the English Language. find
  15. Yassine Iabdounane. 2025. Multimodal Constructional Space. Ph.D. Thesis, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. find
  16. W3C OntoLex Community Group. lemon - The Lexicon Model for Ontologies. find
  17. Arthur Lorenzi, Peter Ljunglöf, Ben Lyngfelt, Tiago Timponi Torrent, William Croft, Alexander Ziem, Nina Böbel, Linnéa Bäckström, Peter Uhrig, and Ely E Matos. 2024. MoCCA: A Model of Comparative Concepts for Aligning Constructicons. In Proceedings of the 20th Joint ACL - ISO Workshop on Interoperab… find
  18. Malin Patel. in prep. Corpus Evidence for Delineating Constructions. Ph.D. Thesis, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. find
  19. Aria Rastegar. 2026. Understanding idioms across languages. Ph.D. Thesis, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. find
  20. Elodie Winckel. 2025. Defining relationships in the constructional network: A Semantic Web ontology for Construction Grammar. Lexicographica, 41(1):299–317. find

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