Finding Corresponding Constructions in English and Japanese in a TED Talk Parallel Corpus using Frames-and-Constructions Analysis

Abstract

This paper reports on an effort to search for corresponding constructions in English and Japanese in a TED Talk parallel corpus, using frames-and-constructions analysis (Ohara, 2019; Ohara and Okubo, 2020; cf. Czulo, 2013, 2017). The purpose of the paper is two-fold: (1) to demonstrate the validity of frames-and-constructions analysis to search for corresponding constructions in typologically unrelated languages; and (2) to assess whether the “Do schools kill creativity?” TED Talk parallel corpus, annotated in various languages for Multilingual FrameNet, is a good starting place for building a multilingual constructicon. The analysis showed that similar to our previous findings involving texts in a Japanese to English bilingual children’s book, the TED Talk bilingual transcripts include pairs of constructions that share similar pragmatic functions. While the TED Talk parallel corpus constitutes a good resource for frame semantic annotation in multiple languages, it may not be the ideal place to start aligning constructions among typologically unrelated languages. Finally, this work shows that the proposed method, which focuses on heads of sentences, seems valid for searching for corresponding constructions in transcripts of spoken data, as well as in written data of typologically-unrelated languages.

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