At the Language Structure Seminar (Språkstrukturseminariet) on May 21, Utpal Pandey will present his ongoing thesis work on reflexives in German and Swedish. Utpal is a PhD student at UT Austin, on a two-month visit to Gothenburg this May and June.
This discusses reflexives in German and Swedish within a usage-based Construction Grammar framework. It addresses how reflexive phenomena can be systematically described across languages in terms of form–meaning pairings and how they relate to other domains such as intensification, reciprocity, and middle voice constructions. The aim is to develop a contrastive constructional network of reflexivity that captures both language-specific patterns and cross-linguistic regularities.
The empirical basis consists of large, balanced web corpora for German and Swedish. Data are retrieved through a combination of manual, semi-automatic, and automatic queries and are annotated on four levels: (i) metadata, (ii) morphosyntactic, (iii) semantic, and (iv) constructional. This multi-layer annotation makes a detailed representation of reflexive structures and their distribution across contexts possible. Methodologically, the dissertation adopts a hybrid approach that combines unsupervised pattern induction with supervised components for annotation and validation. Tokens are represented through feature-based profiles derived from the annotation and are grouped using similarity-based clustering. This procedure allows the identification of recurrent patterns or chunks that may be considered as reflexive constructions.
The analysis proceeds from manual identification of constructional patterns in a controlled sample to automatic detection of comparable patterns in larger datasets. The resulting constructions are organized into a network that models their relations and variation within and across the two languages. By integrating corpus-based analysis with computational methods, the dissertation contributes to the empirical study of reflexives and advances methodological practices in Construction Grammar as well. It demonstrates how constructional patterns can be induced from usage data and systematically compared across languages.