CREA-CONSTRIDIOMS
Creativity through the lens of Construction Grammar: a corpus and AI-based repository of constructional idioms in German, Spanish and English (CREA-CONSTRIDIOMS)
From CONSTRIDIOMS to CREA-CONSTRIDIOMS: Motivation and Continuity
CREA-CONSTRIDIOMS is the natural continuation and conceptual expansion of the CONSTRIDIOMS research project (FFI2019-108783RB-100), which established an unprecedented empirical, methodological, and technological foundation for the study of phraseological constructions (Constructional Idioms, CIs) in German and Spanish from the perspective of Construction Grammar (CxG).
Whereas CONSTRIDIOMS focused on the identification, classification, and contrastive description of CIs, CREA-CONSTRIDIOMS shifts the focus toward linguistic creativity, that is, toward the ways in which speakers exploit the schematic structure of phraseological constructions to generate innovative expressions. The new project capitalizes on the robust descriptive and corpus-based infrastructure created in CONSTRIDIOMS and adds a new theoretical dimension (creativity), a new language (English), and an innovative methodological component (AI-assisted contrastive analysis).
CREA-CONSTRIDIOMS fills a central gap in current linguistic research: moving from the study of creativity as mere productivity to the investigation of creativity as originality and expressive deviation.
CIs constitute a privileged laboratory for observing how speakers recreate, play with, and transform language, which makes this project a key contribution to the study of creativity as a cognitive, cultural, and social phenomenon.
Main Results of CONSTRIDIOMS
The CONSTRIDIOMS project produced a comprehensive research tool of international scope for CIs in German and their equivalents in Spanish. Its main achievements include:
(1) Corpus-based identification and compilation
Using the macrocorpora deTenTen13 and esTenTen18, the project identified and compiled 680 German and Spanish CIs, creating the largest repository of its kind.
(2) CI taxonomy
A taxonomy of German and Spanish CIs was developed based on pragmatic criteria.
(3) Digital infrastructure
The multilingual platform https://constridioms.es/ was created, offering structured, corpus-based descriptions.
(4) Contrastive methodology
An innovative contrastive methodology was designed to identify equivalences between German and Spanish CIs using parallel and monolingual corpora.
(5) Descriptive model
A standardized model was established for the monolingual and contrastive description of CIs.
Innovative Aspects of CREA-CONSTRIDIOMS
CREA-CONSTRIDIOMS introduces a series of key innovations:
- It is the first project to study CIs from the explicit perspective of linguistic creativity, integrating F-creativity and E-creativity within Construction Grammar.
- It combines large-scale corpus linguistics with theoretical models of creativity and treats creativity as a gradual phenomenon.
- It systematically analyzes mechanisms of innovation (analogy, coercion, hyperbole, conceptual blending, metaphor, and context).
- It introduces, for the first time, the use of AI (ChatGPT) to detect interlinguistic equivalences of CIs.
- It has direct applications in lexicography and language teaching.
Objectives of CREA-CONSTRIDIOMS
Objective 1
Selection of CIs according to their creative potential through corpus-based analysis in deTenTen20 and esTenTen23 using Sketch Engine (CQL, concordances, collocations, genres, and registers). The search will be adapted to the CONSTRIDIOMS platform.
Objective 2
Detailed description of CIs in German and Spanish according to constructional and creative parameters, and identification of functional equivalents using parallel corpora (cf. PaGes).
Objective 3
Incorporation of English using ChatGPT, as a Large Language Model, and validation in enTenTen21.
Objective 4
Contrastive study of creativity through mechanisms such as analogy, hyperbole, coercion, blending, context, and metaphorical metaconstructions.
