Linguistic constructions

The present Special Issue features a selection of papers presented at the 10th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (ICLC-10), held from 18 to 21 July 2023 in Mannheim, Germany (https://iclc10.ids-mannheim.de).The aim of the ICLC conference series, running since 1998, is to promote fine-grained cross-linguistic research comprising two or more languages from a broad range of theoretical and methodological perspectives.The collection of articles included in this Special Issue of Languages in Contrast addresses central questions in the contrastive study of selected linguistic constructions as objects of investigation, equivalents to other linguistic expressions, or as diagnostics.In particular, these constructions and the related issues include: future constructions and the role of syntactic complexity in their usage; classifier and quantifier constructions as environments for distinguishing mass versus count nouns; external possession constructions with their case features, grammatical functions, distribution and semantic properties; embedded exclamative constructions as structures whose conventional meaning is claimed to be projected by their matrix clause; existential and presentational constructions and the differences between them in negative contexts; as well as converbs and their range of uses (also including a diachronic perspective).The studies of these constructions take a variety of language pairs into account, including typologically close as well as distant languages, and in some cases, the contrastive analysis is extended to further languages.The contrasted languages are English-Norwegian, English-French, Chinese-English, Korean-Spanish, German-Russian(-Italian) and French-Polish-Czech.All of the contributions are corpus-based and use either monolingual corpora, such as the British National Corpus (BNC), the Open American National Corpus (OANC), the Norwegian Speech Corpus, the BigBrother corpus, Wordbanks Online, Frantext, the Czech National Corpus (CNC), the German Reference Corpus DeReKo, the Russian National Corpus (RNC), the National Corpus of Polish (NKJP) or multilingual corpora, in particular parallel corpora such as OPUS, InterCorp and a self-compiled Chinese-English parallel corpus.In most cases, the corpus data are analyzed using descriptive statistical methods.