Exploring Dutch and French constructions through corpus-based pedagogy: The case of een schat van een kind (lit. ‘a treasure of a child’)

Van Goethem, Kristel;Hendrikx, Isa;Vanderbauwhede, Gudrun
(2026) Biennial International Conference “Constructionist Approaches to Language Pedagogy” (CALP-5) — Location: University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway (UiT) (4.March.2026)

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  • Van Goethem, Kristelorcid-logoUCLouvain
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  • Hendrikx, IsaUniversité de Liège
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  • Vanderbauwhede, GudrunUniversité de Mons
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Abstract
This contribution is part of a funded FNRS contact group entitled Constructions across Languages: Corpus-Based Approaches, which promotes collaboration among researchers who compare constructions across languages based on corpus research. One of the group’s key goals is to produce a pedagogical manual for French-speaking learners of Dutch in Belgium, focusing on comparative corpus-based analyses of Dutch and French. As part of this initiative, the current contribution presents a case study that illustrates how corpus-based Construction Grammar can be integrated into a Master's-level university course. The focus is on the Dutch Evaluative Binominal Construction (EBC) (e.g., een schat van een kind ‘lit. a treasure of a child’) and its French counterpart (e.g., ce bijou de livre ‘this jewel of a book’). This construction can be represented by the schema [DET1 N1 PREP DET2 N2], which links an N1 expressing an evaluative quality to an N2 denoting the entity to which the quality is attributed. Although the EBC has been examined in, among others, English (Aarts 1994, 1998; ten Wolde 2023), Dutch (Verhagen 2005; Van Goethem 2023), and French (Larrivée 1994), cross-linguistic studies (e.g., Foolen 2004) ̶ especially corpus-based ones ̶ remain limited (apart from Piunno 2025). In a 2024 Master's course on Dutch Construction Grammar, we introduced this construction to our students and assigned each one a specific pattern from the top 15 most frequent ones in Dutch (e.g., een pracht / draak van een N ‘lit. a beauty / dragon of an N’). Each pattern was analyzed in terms of formal properties, productivity, and semantic specialization, based on corpus samples of 100 relevant occurrences, extracted from the nlTenTen20 via Sketch Engine. The students were guided through all stages of the research process: data collection and filtering, annotation and categorization, reporting of corpus findings. Parallel to the student work, the first two authors of this paper applied the same methodology to French using the frTenTen23 corpus. The comparative analysis revealed that while both languages use the EBC to express evaluative meaning, the Dutch construction tends to express ameliorative and augmentative connotations (e.g., een pracht van een kerstkaart ‘a beauty of a Christmas card’, een joekel van een auto ‘a whopper of a car’), whereas the French one more often conveys (informal) pejorative nuances (e.g., la putain de patrie ‘that fucking fatherland’). Formally, Dutch allows more variation in the initial determiner position, while French adheres to a more standardized pattern. Finally, the productivity analysis indicates that most French patterns show considerable lexical variation, while certain Dutch patterns exhibit idiomatic usage (e.g., een kast van een huis ‘lit. a cupboard of a house; a huge house’). By engaging the students in hands-on corpus work, the study helped them to uncover subtle semantic and formal features of a common Dutch construction, sometimes even challenging previous claims from the literature, and also highlighted nuanced cross-linguistic differences. As part of our forthcoming pedagogical manual, the case study offers a reproducible framework for comparative constructional research, encouraging students to adopt a constructionist approach that emphasizes attention to form, meaning, and productivity. References Aarts, B. (1994). The syntax of binominal noun phrases in English. Dutch Working Papers in English Language and Linguistics, 30, 1–28. Aarts, B. (1998). Binominal noun phrases in English. Transactions of the Philological Society, 96(1), 117–158. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-968X.00025 Foolen, A. (2004). Expressive binominal NPs in Germanic and Romance languages. In G. Radden & K.-U. Panther (Eds.), Studies in linguistic motivation (pp. 75–100). Mouton de Gruyter. Jakubíček, M., Kilgarriff, A., Kovář, V., Rychlý, P., & Suchomel, V. (2013). The TenTen Corpus Family. In A. Hardie & R. Love (Eds.), Proceedings of the 7th International Corpus Linguistics Conference CL 2013 (pp. 125–127). UCREL. Kilgarriff, A., Rychlý, P., Smrž, P., & Tugwell, D. (2004). The Sketch Engine. In Proceedings of Euralex 2004 (pp. 105–116). Larrivée, P. (1994). Quelques hypothèses sur les structures syntaxique et sémantique de Ce fripon de valet. Revue québécoise de linguistique, 23(2), 101–113. Piunno, V. (2025). Quel genio di lingua. Analisi quantitativa e qualitativa delle costruzioni fraseologiche valutative dell’italiano e confronto con lo spagnolo e il francese. In E. Lavric, Chr. Konecny, C. Konzett-Firth, & M. Messner (Eds.), Actes du IXe Colloque International ‘Linguistique contrastive germano-romane et intraromane’. Frank & Timme. https://hdl.handle.net/10446/305105 Van Goethem, K. (2023). Een pracht van een constructie vs. een prachtconstructie: Een vergelijkende corpusstudie van de syntactische en morfologische expressieve binominale constructie. Nederlandse Taalkunde, 28(2), 325–348. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/279263 Verhagen, A. (2005). Constructiegrammatica en ‘usage-based’ taalkunde. Nederlandse Taalkunde, 10, 197–222. https://hdl.handle.net/1887/14056 ten Wolde, E. (2023). The English binominal noun phrase: A cognitive-functional approach. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108921893
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Van Goethem, K., Hendrikx, I., & Vanderbauwhede, G. (2026). Exploring Dutch and French constructions through corpus-based pedagogy: The case of een schat van een kind (lit. ‘a treasure of a child’). Biennial International Conference “Constructionist Approaches to Language Pedagogy” (CALP-5), University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway (UiT). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/272905