Presentation

Project overview

Currently, the research project funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities that frames our research is titled:
Creativity through the lens of Construction Grammar: a corpus and AI-based repository of constructional idioms in German, Spanish and English (CREA-CONSTRIDIOMS) (PID2024-161338OB-I00)

FUNDING ENTITY: Ministry of Science and Innovation. KNOWLEDGE GENERATION PROJECTS

DURATION: 2025–2029

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Carmen Mellado Blanco

The main objective of the CREA-CONSTRIDIOMS project is to create and expand a multilingual online platform dedicated to the corpus-based description of constructional idioms (CIs) in German, Spanish, and English, with special attention to their creative potential. The project approaches linguistic creativity from a constructionist perspective, building on recent work in Construction Grammar that distinguishes between F-creativity and E-creativity and views creativity as a gradual, rather than categorical, phenomenon.

Constructional idioms in German and Spanish will be selected from the existing CONSTRIDIOMS platform based on their discourse behavior and potential for creative renewal. Corpus linguistics methods will be employed to analyze and describe these constructions considering their frequency, productivity, degree of entrenchment, and variation patterns, as well as processes leading to linguistic innovation, such as analogy, coercion, and creative deviations. Based on this, a list of CIs especially prone to creative use will be established and integrated into an updated version of the CREA-CONSTRIDIOMS platform.

An additional objective of the project is to identify interlinguistic equivalents of the selected phraseological constructions in Spanish, German, and English. The platform will be technically expanded to host data in English, and AI-based methods will be used to support the search for equivalent constructions, which will be empirically validated through corpus analysis (enTenTen21). Beyond its theoretical contribution to Construction Grammar, CREA-CONSTRIDIOMS offers practical applications in lexicography and foreign language teaching by providing a structured, usage-based description of creative constructional patterns.

New Publications

NEW in Quaders de Filología. Estudis Lingüístics, 29, Mellado Blanco,C., Ivorra Ordines, P. & Esteban-Fonollosa, M. (2024). New Approaches to Construction Grammar

En LinRed: Mellado Blanco, Carmen (2021): Proyecto de investigación CONSTRIDIOMS. Las construcciones fraseológicas del alemán y el español en contraste a través de los corpus

Workshop: The dynamics of prepositions and prepositional constructions in Spanish. Proyecto interuniversitario CoPreSpa. Celebrado en: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela (02-04 October 2025)

Members of FRASESPAL

• Principal Investigator: Carmen Mellado Blanco (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela)
• Caterina Chinellato (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela; Università di Bologna)
• Maricel Esteban Fonollosa (Universitat de València)
• Nely Milagros Iglesias Iglesias (Universidad de Salamanca)
• Pedro Ivorra Ordines (Centro universitario de la Defensa)
• Ana Mansilla Pérez (Universidad de Murcia)
• Soraya Pérez Fuertes (Universidad de Salamanca)
• Clara Ureña Tormo (Universitat Politècnica de València)