Formulaic Language and Construction Grammar: Applications in Translation, Lexicography, and Foreign Language Teaching
Frankfurt University, 22–24 March 2027
Conference Overview
The international conference Formulaic Language and Construction Grammar: Applications in Translation, Lexicography, and Foreign Language Teaching is organized within the framework of COST Action 22115 — A Multilingual Repository of Phraseme Constructions in Central and Eastern European Languages (PhraConRep).
The conference brings together researchers working on formulaic language, construction grammar, translation, lexicography, and foreign language teaching, with a special focus on phraseme constructions (PhraCons).
Plenary Speakers
Vida Jesenšek: University of Maribor – Slovenia
Carmen Mellado Blanco: University of Santiago de Compostela – Spain
Title: Es ist ja zum Katholischwerden! Anatomie einer hochexpressiven Phrasem-Konstruktion.
Biodata: Carmen Mellado Blanco is a full professor of German Linguistics at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and a specialist in Construction Grammar (CxG) and Contrastive Linguistics, with particular expertise in the interface between syntax and phraseology. Since 2020, she has published several seminal works on constructional idioms, including Productive Patterns in Phraseology and Construction Grammar (De Gruyter, 2022) and the Special Issue of Languages in Contrast (26:2, 2026), entitled Comparing Constructions in Romance and Germanic Languages. She has served as principal investigator on five externally funded research projects in CxG and is co-editor-in-Chief of the Yearbook of Phraseology (De Gruyter). Since 2007, she has led the FRASESPAL research group, under whose auspices she has organized several international conferences on CxG and phraseology. She has also served as a visiting professor and a keynote speaker at universities in 15 countries across Europe and Latin America.
Thomas Hoffmann: Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (KU) – Germany
Title: There’s more to Construction Grammar than Constructions: Creative idioms and sayings
Biodata: Thomas Hoffmann is full Professor and Chair of English Language and Linguistics at the KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. His main research interests are usage-based Construction Grammar, language variation and change and linguistic creativity. He has published widely in international journals such as Cognitive Linguistics, English Language and Linguistics, and English World-Wide. His monographs Preposition Placement in English (2011) and English Comparative Correlatives: Diachronic and Synchronic Variation at the Lexicon-Syntax Interface (2019) were both published by Cambridge University Press. His textbook on Construction Grammar: The Structure of English (2022) as well as an Element on The Cognitive Foundation of Post-colonial Englishes: Construction Grammar as the Cognitive Theory for the Dynamic Model (2021) have also both been published with Cambridge University Press). He is also co-editor (with Graeme Trousdale) of The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar (2013, Oxford University Press) as well as the Cambridge University Press series Elements in Construction Grammar (with Alexander Bergs). Since 2026 he is a member of the Academia Europaea.
Francesca Masini: University of Bologna – Italy
Provisional title: What makes a successful snowclone?
Biodata: Francesca Masini is Full Professor of Linguistics at the University of Bologna. Her research investigates how meaning is encoded in linguistic structures, with particular attention to concept-naming strategies, evaluative semantics, emerging grammar, non-literal meaning, and linguistic creativity. Working within usage-based Construction Grammar, she combines qualitative analysis with quantitative and experimental methods, including from a cross-linguistic perspective. She is leading the development of the Italian Constructicon. She is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Constructions and Frames and co-founder of Linguisticamente, the first Italian website devoted to the popularization of linguistics. She is currently Deputy Rector at the University of Bologna, where she also serves as Delegate for Open Science, Data, and Research Evaluation.
Miloš Jakubíček – Lexical Computing and Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic.
Tamas Kispal: Georg-August Universität Göttingen – Germany
Dr. Tamás Kispál is a linguist and senior lecturer at the Seminar for German Philology at the University of Göttingen, where he has taught since 2014. He holds a PhD on the application of the Cognitive Metaphor Theory to idioms (2010), from the University of Szeged, where he also began his early academic career before relocating to Germany. At Göttingen, he currently offers German language courses and M.A. courses on teaching German as a foreign language. He serves as an examiner for the DSH, i.e. the German Language Test for University Admission, and he is a member of the nationwide DSH-Qualitätszirkel (DSH Quality Circle).
Dr. Kispál’s expertise extends across cognitive linguistics, phraseology, lexicography, and German as a Foreign Language (DaF). He serves on the international advisory board of Europhras and is a member of the editorial boards for the Yearbook of Phraseology and the proverb research annual Proverbium.
Dr. Kispál has contributed significantly to major European projects, including the EU-LLP initiative SprichWort, the collaborative project Persuasionsstile in Europa, and the active EU COST Action PhraConRep, where he is a Management Committee member for Germany and leads the didactical working group of the project.
Çiler Hatipoğlu: Middle East Technical University – Turkey
Title: Making Phraseme Constructions Teachable: Research, Materials and Methodologies for Foreign Language Classrooms
Biodata: Çiler HATIPOĞLU (https://avesis.metu.edu.tr/ciler) is a Professor in the Department of Foreign Language Education at Middle East Technical University (METU), where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Linguistics and Foreign Language Education. Her research focuses on foreign language assessment, pragmatics, cross-cultural communication, and corpus linguistics. She has published over 150 articles in leading national and international journals, including Language Testing, Journal of Pragmatics, System, and the International Journal of Applied Linguistics, as well as books with publishers such as John Benjamins and Palgrave Macmillan. She has also edited books and special issues in her research areas. Professor Hatipoğlu has participated in and led numerous national and international research projects on corpus linguistics, teacher education and formative assessment (MEB–UNICEF), language assessment (EU), cross-cultural politeness (EU), and language learning and material development (COST Action), including serving on the first Spoken Turkish Corpus development team (http://std.metu.edu.tr).
Scientific committee
Hiwa Asadpour
Meliha Hrustić
Çiler Hatipoğlu
Pedro Ivorra-Ordines
Vladimir Karabalić
Tamás Kispál
Ema Kristo
Veronika Lipp
Ljubomir Ivanović
Nikolche Mickoski
Carmen Mellado Blanco
Neslihan Önder Özdemir
Sanela Mešić
Katrin Schlund
Ekaterina Strati
Joanna Szczȩk