This dataset contains a cross-lingual inventory of non-compositional microsyntactic units in six Slavic languages, namely, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian.

The original expressions in Russian were retrieved from the Russian National Corpus (RNC) (https://ruscorpora.ru/) that provides a dictionary of syntactic idioms includes prepositions, adverbial and predicatives, parenthetical expressions, conjunctions, and particles. For each Russian expression, the database also provides its frequency score in the RNC sub-corpora.

We sorted the available expressions by their frequency scores and selected the 50 most frequent microsyntactic units from each category except for particles, for which only 27 distinct expressions are available. This got us a total of 227 microsyntactic units in Russian. Next, we used the search function of the RNC to extract translational correlates together with two parallel bilingual context sentences from the parallel sub-corpora. We acknowledge that direct correlates of microsyntactic units in different languages are not always available. Thus, we used partial correspondence whenever required, which we believe still allows us to compare microsyntactic units at scale. In a similar way, we used the search function of Czech National Corpus (https://korpus.cz/). We obtained six parallel sets of 227 microsyntactic units with parallel bilingual context sentences for each unit in all of the six Slavic languages. Each of the translated expressions and sentences was proofread and, when required, corrected by professional linguists that are also native speakers of the target language.

Our multilingual database of syntactic idioms (microsyntactic phenomena) enables us to compare these phenomena across different languages and can be later used for further research on syntactic idiomaticity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first database of its kind.

Authors:

Iuliia Zaitova (Saarland University)
Irina Stenger (Saarland University)
Tania Avgustinova (Saarland University)