UCxn: Typologically Informed Annotation of Constructions Atop Universal
  Dependencies
Leonie Weissweiler Nina Böbel Kirian Guiller Santiago Herrera Wesley Scivetti Arthur Lorenzi Nurit Melnik Archna Bhatia Hinrich Schütze Lori Levin Amir Zeldes Joakim Nivre William Croft Nathan Schneider
The Universal Dependencies (UD) project has created an invaluable collection
of treebanks with contributions in over 140 languages. However, the UD
annotations do not tell the full story. Grammatical constructions that convey
meaning through a particular combination of several morphosyntactic elements --
for example, interrogative sentences with special markers and/or word orders --
are not labeled holistically. We argue for (i) augmenting UD annotations with a
'UCxn' annotation layer for such meaning-bearing grammatical constructions, and
(ii) approaching this in a typologically informed way so that morphosyntactic
strategies can be compared across languages. As a case study, we consider five
construction families in ten languages, identifying instances of each
construction in UD treebanks through the use of morphosyntactic patterns. In
addition to findings regarding these particular constructions, our study yields
important insights on methodology for describing and identifying constructions
in language-general and language-particular ways, and lays the foundation for
future constructional enrichment of UD treebanks.