Multilingual Pragmaticon: Database of Discourse Formulae

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 3331–3336 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 3331 Multilingual Pragmaticon: Database of Discourse Formulae Anton Buzanov, Polina Bychkova, Arina Molchanova, Anna Postnikova, Daria Ryzhova HSE University, Moscow, Russia aamolchanova 3@edu.hse.ru {abuzanov, pbychkova, apostnikova, dryzhova}@hse.ru Abstract The paper presents a multilingual database aimed to be used as a tool for typological analysis of response constructions called discourse formulae (DF), cf. English No way! or French C¸ a va! (≈ ‘all right’). The two primary qualities that make DF of theoretical interest for linguists are their idiomaticity and the special nature of their meanings (cf. consent, refusal, negation), determined by their dialogical function. The formal and semantic structures of these items are language-specific. Compiling a database with DF from various languages would help estimate the diversity of DF in both of these aspects, and, at the same time, establish some frequently occurring patterns. The DF in the database are accompanied with glosses and assigned with multiple tags, such as pragmatic function, additional semantics, the illocutionary type of the context, etc. As a starting point, Russian, Serbian and Slovene DF are included into the database. This data already shows substantial grammatical and lexical variability. Keywords: linguistic database, pragmaticalization, discourse formulae, pragmatic typology, Construction Grammar 1. Introduction In the last three decades, there has been a surge in developement of various standardized multilingual on- tologies and databases, such as BabelNet (Navigli and Ponzetto, 2012), WordNet (Miller, 1995), FrameNet (Baker et al., 2003), MetaNet (Dodge et al., 2015), DatSemShift (Zalizniak et al., 2012), and many others. These resources are mostly lexically oriented. Besides traditional definitions of the words, they contain data about semantic relations between meanings, syntactic rules of their use, examples, and, often, translational equivalents. Most importantly, every resource follows its own fixed scheme of data description and storage, hence the data coming from different languages and contributors remain fully comparable. Resources of this kind are treated as a new generation of dictionar- ies and are widely used in both practical application (see, for example, (Vial et al., 2019; Chakravarthi et al., 2019; Marzinotto et al., 2019)) and theoretical re- search ((Boas, 2001; Koco´n and Maziarz, 2021; Zaliz- niak, 2021), and many others). However, theoretical findings, especially in the frame- work of Construction Grammar (Fillmore, 1988; Gold- berg, 1995; Hoffmann and Trousdale, 2013), show that there are many linguistic units other than words, with specific contextual distribution and non-compositional meanings. They equally require representation in the form of semantically annotated databases. The so- called Constructicons that appeared recently for differ- ent languages (Lyngfelt et al., 2018) illustrate the re- sources of this kind. They catalog constructions, pro- viding information on their semantics and the restric- tions on their use in a sentence. In this paper, we present the database of discourse for- mulae (DF). Discourse formulae are a special class of constructions which serve as idiomatic reactions to other utterances in dialog. They express …

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