Norske språkmønstre - Online Constructicon for Learners of Norwegian

House of Languages is the initiator and lead partner of the Nordplus project “Online Constructicon for Learners of Norwegian.” Since you’re probably wondering what the hell a constructicon is, we might as well admit that we are working on something relatively new. A constructicon is a collection of constructions used in a language, much like a dictionary. And a construction, in linguistic terms, is something that lies between grammar and words. These are multi-word units, ready-made pieces of language with a fixed structure from which countless utterances can be built. For example, you can express your surprise by starting a question with [a question word] the hell – that’s a construction. Did you know that Norwegians are just as fond of invoking the devil as Latvians?

Our constructicon is called Norske språkmønstre (Norwegian Language patterns) and brings together 300 frequently used constructions that help learners build their language fluency. This will be the first constructicon for Norwegian (in parallel, a large-scale constructicon – Språknett – is being developed at the University of Tromsø), and with it Norwegian will join just around ten other languages that already have their own constructicon. However, this will be the world’s first pedagogical constructicon with language non-academic teachers and learners as the main audience. The distinctive contribution of our project will be tasks and classroom activities that help learners build language from our carefully selected “building blocks.” The classroom activities are being made also for Swedish.

We are developing the constructicon in collaboration with the University of Gothenburg (where the Swedish Constructicon was born 10 years ago), the University of Bergen, and Vilnius University.