KONSTRUKTSIOONIKANDIDAATIDE LEIDMINE EESTI KEELE KONSTRUKTIKONI JAOKS
IDENTIFYING CONSTRUCTION CANDIDATES FOR THE ESTONIAN CONSTRUCTICON

Summary/Abstract: This article outlines principles for compiling the nomenclature for the Estonian Constructicon (Vainik et al. 2024, Paulsen et al. 2025), understood as a structured inventory of constructions comparable to dictionary entries. It reviews approaches used in constructicons for other languages and identifies resources relevant to Estonian, with particular emphasis on pedagogical constructicography, as one of the main target groups of the Estonian Constructicon is learners and teachers of Estonian as a second language. The analysis showed that, in compiling the nomenclature, it is reasonable to combine different methods and to collect candidates in stages. In the first stage, construction candidates attested in E2 textbooks, pedagogical grammars, language proficiency level descriptions, L2 learner texts, and dictionaries intended for E2 learners should be examined in order to identify and define relevant constructions. In subsequent stages, additional sources could be gradually incorporated, and, alongside gathering constructional candidates from existing resources, different corpus-based analysis techniques, including construction mining, should be implemented. Future development should include automated extraction methods and the use of large language models to capture previously undescribed constructions and refine existing descriptions. The Estonian Constructicon is planned to be built as an extension of the EKI Combined Dictionary (Langemets et al. 2021) and as such it will integrate grammatical and lexical information into a unified resource supporting the systematic description of Estonian constructions at different language proficiency levels.

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