Construction Grammar-Based Research on Slovak, in Slovakia: A Case Study and a Road Map
Construction Grammar-Based Research on Slovak, in Slovakia: A Case Study and a Road Map

Summary/Abstract: This paper presents a pioneering application of Construction Grammar (CxG) to Slovak, a language largely underrepresented in constructionist research. After providing a comprehensive introduction to CxG and its theoretical foundations, we present a case study of the Slovak Comparative Correlative (CC) construction (e.g., Čím menej rečí tu bude, tým skôr zaspím ‘The less talking there is here, the sooner I will fall asleep’). In the context of a large-scale corpus study based on over 3,500 tokens from the Slovak Web 2011 corpus, we demonstrate how constructionist methodology is applied, employing covarying-collexeme analysis to reveal statistically significant patterns of cross-clausal association across the CC’s subclauses. Our findings uncover an intricate network of interconnected meso-constructions, demonstrating both high productivity and a strong tendency toward formal symmetry. The case study thus provides robust empirical support for a usage-based, network-oriented view of Slovak grammar, in line with previous investigations of the English and Spanish CC constructions. Our study not only enriches our understanding of the Slovak CC construction but also argues for the value and feasibility of CxG approaches in ‘smaller’ Slavic languages. We conclude with a roadmap for future CxG-based research on Slovak, advocating for comprehensive construct-i-con projects that ‘map out’ the constructional networks of Slovak, and the integration of complementary methodologies in doing so. Our results contribute both theoretically and methodologically to constructionist linguistics and serve as a template for more comparable studies in Slovak and other underexplored languages.

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