An inventory of frequent German constructions for contrastive analysis: theoretical description and cross-linguistic challenges

In the introduction to the volume Contrastive Studies in Construction Grammar Boas (2010: 11) underlines the need for “creating a complete record of constructional inventories of languages that we want to include in our cross-linguistic constructional investigations”. Construction Grammar linguists have addressed this request by developing so-called “constructicons”, i.e. repositories of the lexicogrammatical constructions of a language based on Semantic Frames (see among others Fillmore et al. (2012) for Framenet and Boas & Ziem (2018) for the German Gfol). In a cross-linguistic or contrastive perspective, most studies have started from English constructional patterns for the description of equivalents in other languages (Boas & Gonzalvez-Garcia (2014: 2)).

My study adopts a different approach as it wants to establish an inventory of authentic and frequent German constructions in contrast with Romance languages, and more specifically French, without referring explicitly to Frames. Starting from examples collected in German press articles and from the German deTenTen20 corpus of the SketchEngine, the aim is, first, to define typical German constructional patterns for which no or hardly any equivalents exist in Romance languages and, second, to discuss the motivation behind the issues related to the contrastive analysis German–French.

Drawing up an inventory of German constructional patterns and their possible equivalents in French is important for translation studies but also for foreign language learning and teaching.