Framenets and constructiCons are applied instantiations of the linguistic frameworks known as Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar, respectively, in the form of computational, semiformally structured linguistic resources. The resources have a common history, both theoretically and in design: They are built as English-language resources in the framework of the Berkeley FrameNet initiative. They enjoy the double nature of being descriptive linguistic resources as well as finding frequent use in a computational linguistic context, where they have been used both in NLP applications and as underlying knowledge bases in areas such as computer-assisted language learning. The chapter provides a bird’s-eye view on these resources: their theoretical foundations; design principles and how they are compiled; theoretical and methodological interrelations; the challenges involved in building framenets and constructiCons for new languages and for cross-linguistic application; the differences and interactions between linguistic and computational linguistic work on framenets and constructiCons; application to language pedagogy; and outstanding theoretical and methodological issues.

The introduction provides an overview of the reasons why sustainable finance is high in the regulatory agenda, in the EU and increasingly elsewhere. It shows how the EU started to follow up on the UN goals for a more sustainable development, and how it translated those goals, first into its action plans and then into regulatory measures. The case for sustainability as a tool to manage climate and environmental risks is then explained. The introduction then summarises the contents and the main results of each chapter within the collection.

There is a large body of academic literature about financial inclusion and financial exclusion in both applied and theoretical works. The causes, sizes, and consequences of both phenomena are analyzed and evaluated, which leads to the formulation of conclusions and recommendations as to how to enhance financial inclusion. This chapter surveys not only the traditional perspective of financial inclusion and exclusion but also the role of new technologies, providing innovative solutions behind the concept of digital banking inclusion. Moreover, the chapter considers new possibilities for adopting digital financial services that result from lockdowns and promotion of contactless modes of payment to reduce the risk of viruses spread through the handling of cash. With regard to the increased use of digital banking access channels, the importance of financial education in the context of ensuring cybersecurity is highlighted.

This chapter presents an overview of some of the central concepts of constructional syntax. Focusing on key insights from Berkeley Construction Grammar and Cognitive Construction Grammar, it discusses how construction entries of different types from the inventory of constructions interact with each other to license constructs. This chapter also outlines a novel methodology for discovering constructions in a corpus that allows for a systematic way of compiling construction entries that are relevant for research in Construction Grammar and constructicography.

Spoken language exhibits not only grammatical constructions but also prosodic constructions. While the latter are also form–function mappings, there are differences: Prosodic constructions involve temporal configurations of diverse prosodic features, their functions are primarily pragmatics-related and interactional, they can be present to greater or lesser degrees, and they are frequently superimposed and aligned in complex ways with other prosodic constructions and with grammatical constructions. This chapter illustrates these properties with examples from American English.

A fundamental pillar of the European Commission’s Strategy for Financing the Transition to a Sustainable Economy, harmonized sustainability reporting is functional to giving substance to a company’s sustainability endeavors, to identifying a shared classification system for sustainable activities, to tackling greenwashing, and to helping institutional investors meet the disclosure obligations they, in turn, are imposed on by the SFDR. While institutional investors remain the main users of corporate sustainability disclosures, yet sustainability reporting facilitates interaction between investors and other stakeholders, such as NGOs, as a lever by which to enhance stakeholders’ voice and overcome the limited ability of broadly diversified institutions, especially passive fund managers, to actively monitor portfolio firms and reduce systematic portfolio risk. In order for EU sustainability reporting to deliver on its promises, two factors are crucial. First, the current fragmentation of non-financial reporting standards based on different frameworks and, particularly, on diverging notions of materiality, should be overcome. Second, an adequate balance between the narrative and quantitative dimensions of sustainability reporting should be struck in order not only to make sustainability disclosures meaningful for its users, but also to allow for mutually connecting, and achieving coordination between, financial and non-financial information.

Finance that does not take sustainability seriously is finance that does not take finance seriously. The financial risks of continued unsustainabilities bring sustainability issues into the heart of any well-founded financial decision, whatever view one might have on the role of finance and business in society. In this chapter, the relationship between finance and sustainability is explored through a broadening of the approach to understanding financial risks of unsustainability. This goes beyond the established recognition of the financial risks of climate change – and the emerging recognition of financial risks of biodiversity loss. The analysis presents new risk categories, including the risk of business model change, societal risk and global catastrophic risks. The chapter also exemplifies new categories of unsustainability that should be encompassed in such a broader and systemic approach, including ‘novel entities’ and tax evasion. The chapter concludes with brief reflections on the necessity of and the legal basis for implementing a research-based approach to risks of unsustainability in law and policy reforms and in practice.

The chapter gives a general overview of the approach to constructional analysis called Construction Discourse, where the term ‘discourse’ is implanted with the same rigor and systematicity as the term ‘grammar’ has in Construction Grammar. In Construction Discourse, constructions are not seen as form–meaning pairings, but as form–meaning–discourse constellations. A set of twelve discourse attributes is postulated and some of them are illustrated in more detail. Together, these twelve discourse attributes (and their respective values) are seen as being able to define aspects of ‘context’ that are necessary for a full description and analysis of the dynamicity of language. The intricacies of Construction Discourse are illustrated with a detailed analysis of the Wellerism construction in the Solv dialect of Swedish.

Construction Grammar and typology share many assumptions and each approach can fruitfully inform the other. Both fields start from a pairing of form and function and treat lexicon, morphology, and syntax as a continuum of varying strategies to express function. Cross-linguistic comparison leads to a distinction between language-particular categories and structures, determined by distributional analysis, and comparative concepts that are cross-linguistically valid. Strategies are morphosyntactic formal structures that are defined language-independently and constructions are comparative concepts; as such, constructions and their components can be aligned across languages, and strategies allow the alignment of morphosyntactic structures used for constructions across languages. Typologists have also developed representations of the conceptual relations between the functions of different constructions in terms of conceptual spaces. Typological diversity also suggests that the only universal syntactic structure is the part–whole relation between a construction and its constituents. Both Construction Grammar and typology give a prominent role to diachrony, seeing constructions as lineages.

The relatively new world of ESG indicators displays many similarities with the original markets for ratings and benchmarks, but it also has some distinguishing features. This chapter explores to what extent the regulatory strategies that were developed in ‘traditional’ financial law to support confidence in ratings and benchmarks can be exported to the ‘new’ world of ESG finance, and concludes that policymakers should be cautions when transposing rules. This is especially the case with ESG ratings. In this area, credit ratings are the immediate reference for ESG rating regulation also, because of the common label of ‘rating’, which is rather misleading, and of the anchoring effect this entails. First, the assessments underlying ESG ratings are often more subjective than those supporting traditional indicators, due to their multivariate nature. Second, the risk of regulatory failures connected to the authorisation and registration labels also seems higher in the ‘new’ world of sustainability. The chapter analyses the new ESG Ratings Regulation and the Benchamkr Regulation against this backdrop, and highlights the suboptimality of some policy choices.

This chapter explores the potential of Construction Grammar for analyzing literary texts. First, it investigates typical features of literary language from a constructional point of view. Fairy tales, for example, are characterized by their opening lines like “Once upon a time …,” analyzed as a concrete, complex construction. Similarly, many authors, styles, and genres are characterized by particular constructions, or the use of particular words and phrases. The second section deals with creative, innovative, and seemingly ‘rule-breaking’ language in a constructional framework, suggesting that Construction Grammar as a usage-based and cognitively plausible model offers the perfect toolkit to analyze seemingly unruly linguistic behavior. The third part deals with literary genres as linguistic units beyond the sentence, arguing that literary texts are also learned form–meaning pairings and can be treated as constructions. Genres as constructions may change dynamically over time and be subject to prototypeeffects. Drawing on numerous examples, this chapter thus demonstrates that literary language and texts can be productively analyzed using concepts and methods of Construction Grammar.

This study enquires about the role of conduct risk with respect to the currently evolving ESG-related regulation wave. It questions the relevance of conduct risk as an additional determinant of banks’ effective intermediation in the ESG value chain, in addition to normatively set non-financial reporting, governance and due diligence duties. The suitability of a conduct risk-based approach to the identification and management of ESG risks is grounded in the conceptualization of ESG regulations as (sustainable) conduct of business rules centred on the management of ESG risk. This systemic reading of ESG-related rules explains and at the same time supports the main assumption underlying this study, namely that, while setting norms of conduct for the management of sustainability risks, the emerging framework engenders new risks of unsustainable conduct. The analysis finally argues that the flexible and cultural-sensitive nature of conduct risk makes it an effective tool for the forecast, correction and even prevention of potentially harmful misconducts directly stemming from either the missed or wrongful enactment of ESG policies. Ultimately, it is argued that the employment of conduct risk in the field of ESG is useful to re-conceptualize the bank’s internal risk management of inappropriate behaviour, also from a prudential perspective.

This chapter discusses the role of frequency for Construction Grammar, especially concerning usage-based models of language, and offers definitions of different aspects of frequency, namely token frequency, type frequency, relative frequency, frequency of co-occurrence, and dispersion. It discusses how these aspects can be measured on the basis of corpus data, and how these measurements allow the observation of frequency effects that relate to phenomena such as entrenchment, ease of processing, productivity, phonological reduction, and resistance to regularization. These effects are illustrated by experimental and corpus-based analyses of lexical, morphological, and syntactic constructions. The chapter also addresses open questions regarding the role of frequency in constructionist research. Not only is the relation between corpus frequencies and theoretical notions such as entrenchment far from trivial, it is also important not to attribute effects to token frequency that can be explained by other, correlating variables. The chapter will also examine strategies that can reach beyond the use of frequency values in the future development of Construction Grammar.