Dictionary of English constructions.
It is a family of construction grammars that started maybe in the 80s with the work of Fillmore & Kay among others. Examples of constructions include
- the time + away construction ( they danced the night away )
- the way construction ( he glad handed his way into the club )
- the incredulity construction ( Bush, an agent of terrorism? What
is a dictionary of constructions? I’m not looking for something exhaustive, but fairly extensive. Google has been denying me a dictionary for years. This dictionary is not good enough to answer “The Taishukan Contemporary Dictionary of English constructions” though I was surprised by the reference of the Japanese title.
I don’t have a good answer for you yet. I don’t have a good answer for you. I’ve never heard of or seen such a reference, and meeting with a philologist… so I suspect it would be on the reference shelf someday, if it were available.
If you want to try to gain an at-a-glance sense of construction grammar in English, I would suggest taking a look at an idiom dioptonary. Is there any downloadable ones that can be searched through by relying on the find feature of any reader/text editor?
Some basic code to scrape and parse online disdictionaries would not be THAT complicated to write… it is surprising to me that there aren’t at least some online to deal with this problem domain.
