This thesis presents an investigation into the causes surrounding the emergence and spread of temporal auxiliary verb omission in Swedish. In modern Swedish, certain finite auxiliary verbs can be elided in the perfect and the pluperfect in subordinate clauses. Furthermore, the auxiliary verb in non-finite perfects can be omitted (subject to a number of restrictions) in three different classes of non-finite clause. At the end of the 17th century, auxiliary verb omission spread rapidly in all types of subordinate clause. It has been suggested in previous research that this might be the result of the influence of German. The emergence and spread of non-finite auxiliary verb omission has not been previously examined. Traditionally, it has been suggested that omission of the non-finite auxiliary verb was a grammatical feature of the language since the Old Swedish period. In this thesis, I report on two different studies. In the first, I investigated the course of events outlining the spread of finite auxiliary verb omission during the Early Modern Swedish period. In the second study, I examined the occurrence of infinitive perfects in Old- and Early Modern Swedish. Additionally, I searched for instances of auxiliary verb omission in those very constructions. The results of the study of the finite auxiliary verbs were in agreement with previous studies in this area of grammar, as expected. The results of the study of the non-finite verb forms, however, were not anticipated: non-finite auxiliary verb omission spread throughout the language only after the finite auxiliary verb omission was already established. Taking these results into consideration, I assume that finite auxiliary verb omission emerged in Swedish due to the process of grammatical replication from New High German. The (optional) possibility of auxiliary verb omission then spread to infinitival clauses by analogical extension. A number of consequences of auxiliary omission are the emergence of the supine, a specific perfect participle form which differs in form and meaning from the past participle and the loss of temporal auxiliary verb form vara, ‘be’.

In Swedish it is possible to omit the nite temporal auxiliary have in subordinate clauses: jag känner en som (har) bott i Berlin, ’I know someone who has lived in Berlin’. Here, the present and past perfect are expressed with only the past participle. Ever since Johannisson (1945) it has been claimed that nite auxiliary omission emerged in Swedish at the end of the 17th century as a syntactic loan from New High German (NHG). This is proposition has later been restated by subsequent researchers (e.g. Platzack 1983, Malmgren 1985). Although the idea that Swedish auxiliary omission emerged due to German inuence has been reproduced in the literature, there has been no explanation of how this transfer might have proceeded in terms of a formal linguistic framework. In this paper I will suggest one. Heine & Kuteva (2005, 2006) have formulated a model for contact-induced syntactic change, namely grammatical replication. Grammatical replication encompasses syntactic structures associated with a certain meaning or function. In the process, a language (R) produces a new structure (Rx) based on the structure (Mx) in a model language (M). When nite auxiliary omission emerged in Swedish, there was a high frequency of equivalent verbless constructions in written NHG texts. German-Swedish language contact during the time is well documented, and I suggest that Swedish auxiliary omission is an instance of grammatical replication.

In Swedish it is possible to omit the temporal auxiliary ha ‘have’, in certain contexts. Infinitival ha can be omitted in modal verb phrases in main clauses (1) whereas finite ha can be omitted in subordinate clauses (2). (1) Pjäsen borde (ha) börjat nu. The play should (have) begun now ‘The play should have begun now’ (2) Hon berättade att hon (hade) sett honom tidigare. She told that she (had) seen him earlier ‘She told me that she had seen him earlier’ The ha-omission phenomenon emerged by the end of the Early Modern Swedish period, i.e. in the end of the 17th century. Traditionally, two explanatory circumstances have been suggested. One is that ha-omission is a syntactic loan from German and the other that it is a written language phenomenon (cf. Johannisson 1945, Platzack 1983, Malmgren 1985). A theoretically grounded description of the origin and evolution of ha-omission is yet to be made. Hitherto only a few synchronic studies within a generative framework have been presented (e.g. Julien 2002). In the last decade diachronic construction grammar has been demonstrated as a useful tool to expose the mechanisms at work within this kind of language change (Traugott & Trousdale 2013, Barðdal et al. in press, Hilpert 2013, Bergs & Diewald 2008). I will present a diachronic study of ha-omission in Swedish and discuss some possible explanations to why the temporal auxiliary is omitted. Could the phenomenon have to do with grammaticalization concerning the auxiliary and/or the participle? Or could it be a matter of constructionalization of the larger constructions in which they occur?

We present an experiment designed for extracting construction candidates for a Swedish constructicon from text corpora. We have explored the use of hybrid n-grams with the practical goal to discover previously undescribed partially schematic constructions. The experiment was successful, in that quite a few new constructions were discovered. The precision is low, but as a push-button tool for construction discovery, it has proven a valuable tool for the work on a Swedish constructicon.

This article addresses the possibility of linking constructicon resources for different languages, in particular English and Swedish. The entries in Berkeley's English constructicon have been compared to Swedish, with focus on potential correspondences in a Swedish constructicon. In most cases, approximately corresponding Swedish constructions could be established, although typically with minor differences, often concerning grammatical markers. The closest equivalents are, typically, relatively general grammatical constructions, whereas constructions containing specific lexical elements tend to differ more. In order to link all corresponding constructions between the two resources, a combination of strategies seems to be required. Constructions with a referential meaning may be linked via FrameNet frames, while those with a more abstract grammatical function may be related in terms of their grammatical properties.

We present an experiment where natural language processing tools are used to automatically identify potential constructions in a corpus. The experiment was conducted as part of the ongoing efforts to develop a Swedish constructicon. Using an automatic method to suggest constructions has advantages not only for efficiency but also methodologically: it forces the analyst to look more objec-tively at the constructions actually occurring in corpora, as opposed to focusing on “interesting” constructions only. As a heuristic for identifying potential constructions, the method has proved successful, yielding about 200 (out of 1,200) highly relevant construction candidates.

This paper presents MoCCA, a Model of Comparative Concepts for Aligning Constructicons under development by a consortium of research groups building Constructicons of different languages including Brazilian Portuguese, English, German and Swedish. The Constructicons will be aligned by using comparative concepts (CCs) providing language-neutral definitions of linguistic properties. The CCs are drawn from typological research on grammatical categories and constructions, and from FrameNet frames, organized in a conceptual network. Language-specific constructions are linked to the CCs in accordance with general principles. MoCCA is organized into files of two types: a largely static CC Database file and multiple Linking files containing relations between constructions in a Constructicon and the CCs. Tools are planned to facilitate visualization of the CC network and linking of constructions to the CCs. All files and guidelines will be versioned, and a mechanism is set up to report cases where a language-specific construction cannot be easily linked to existing CCs. © 2024 ELRA Language Resource Association: CC BY-NC 4.0.

This chapter addresses central topics in constructicography from the viewpoint of the Swedish constructicon project (SweCcn), focusing on practical constructicon development. The full process of construction description is described and discussed, from selection via corpus analysis to finished constructicon entry and beyond, towards structuring the set of entries into a network. Particular attention is given to the description format and the treatment of constructional variation. A main theme in the chapter is the interdependence and alignment of SweCcn and related resources, on the one hand in the local context, notably the infrastructure of Språkbanken (the Swedish language bank), and on the other hand with respect to corresponding resources for other languages. Of key concern is the relation to FrameNet, both the Swedish and other framenets, and a major section is devoted to conditions for linking constructions and frames.

This chapter addresses interlingual relations between constructions. The perspective is contrastive rather than typological, with an aim towards multilingual constructicon development. Building on previous work on the alignment of frame-based multilingual lexical databases, we explore possibilities and problems for multilingual constructicography. By comparing the dataset of Berkeley's English constructicon to Brazilian Portuguese and Swedish, we discuss the alignment of constructicons vis á vis the existence of more or less equivalent constructions or the deployment of different linguistic strategies in different languages. © 2018 John Benjamins Publishing Company

This paper introduces the Swedish Constructicon (SweCxn), a database of Swedish constructions currently under development. We also present a small study of the treatment of constructions in Swedish (paper) dictionaries, thus illustrating the need for a constructionist approach, and discuss three different methods used to identify potential constructions for inclusion in the constructicon. SweCxn is a freely available electronic resource, with a particular focus on semi-general linguistic patterns of the type that are difficult to account for from a purely lexicographic or a purely grammatical perspective, and which therefore have tended to be neglected in both dictionaries and grammars. Far from being a small set of borderline cases, such constructions are both numerous and common. They are also quite problematic for second language acquisition as well as LT applications. Accordingly, various kinds of multi-word units have received more attention in recent years, not least from a lexicographic perspective. The coverage, however, is only partial, and the productivity of many constructions is hard to capture from a lexical viewpoint. To identify constructions for SweCxn, we use a combination of methods, such as working from existing construction descriptions for Swedish and other languages, applying LT tools to discover recurring patterns in texts, and extrapolating constructional information from dictionaries.