Bank of Russian Constructions and Valencies

The Bank of Russian Constructions and Valencies (Russian FrameBank) is an annotation project that takes as input samples from the Russian National Corpus (http://www.ruscorpora.ru). Since Russian verbs and predicates from other POS classes have their particular and not always predictable case pattern, these words and their argument structures are to be described as lexical constructions. The slots of partially filled phrasal constructions (e.g. vzjal i uexal ‘he suddenly (lit. took and) went away’) are also under analysis. Thus, the notion of construction is understood in the sense of Fillmore’s Construction Grammar and is not limited to that of argument structure of verbs. FrameBank brings together the dictionary of constructions and the annotated collection of examples. Our goal is to mark the set of arguments and adjuncts of a certain construction. The main focus is on realization of the elements in the running text, to facilitate searches through pattern realizations by a certain combination of features. The relevant dataset involves lexical, POS and other morphosyntactic tags, semantic classes, as well as grammatical constructions that introduce or license the use of elements within a given construction.