NomVallex: A Valency Lexicon of Czech Nouns and Adjectives

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 1344–1352 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 1344 NomVallex: A Valency Lexicon of Czech Nouns and Adjectives Veronika Kolářová, Anna Vernerová Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic Malostranské náměstí 25, 118 00 Prague 1, Czech Republic {kolarova, vernerova}@ufal.mff.cuni.cz Abstract We present NomVallex, a manually annotated valency lexicon of Czech nouns and adjectives. The lexicon is created in the theoretical framework of the Functional Generative Description and based on corpus data. In total, NomVallex 2.0 is comprised of 1027 lexical units contained in 570 lexemes, covering the following part-of-speech and derivational categories: deverbal and deadjectival nouns, and deverbal, denominal, deadjectival and primary adjectives. Valency properties of a lexical unit are captured in a valency frame which is modeled as a sequence of valency slots, supplemented with a list of morphemic forms. In order to make it possible to study the relationship between valency behavior of base words and their derivatives, lexical units of nouns and adjectives in NomVallex are linked to their respective base words, contained either in NomVallex itself or, in case of verbs, in a valency lexicon of Czech verbs called VALLEX. NomVallex enables a comparison of valency properties of a significant number of Czech nominals with their base words, both manually and in an automatic way; as such, we can address the theoretical question of argument inheritance, concentrating on systemic and non-systemic valency behavior. Keywords: valency, lexicon, nouns, adjectives, derivational relation 1. Introduction Valency is the “capacity a verb (or noun, etc.) has for combining with particular patterns of other sentence constituents” (Allerton, 2006: 301). Exhibited not only by verbs, but also by some nouns, adjectives or adverbs, valency thus forms the syntactic core of the sentence. While valency of verbs has enjoyed long-standing interest from linguists, the description of valency of nouns (Grimshaw, 1990; Spevak, 2014; Krasikova et al., 2019) or adjectives (Haugen, 2013) has long remained out of their spotlight. Concerning deverbal and deadjectival nouns, legitimacy of inferring their valency properties from their base words is addressed, see the so-called argument inheritance proposed by Booij (2007) and discussed by Allerton (2006), Goldberg (2006), Herbst (1988) or Moravcsik (2009). Being the subject of both theoretical and lexicographic studies, valency of nouns and adjectives is captured in some English valency lexicons (Herbst et al., 2004) and lexical databases created for NLP applications such as FrameNet (Ruppenhofer et al., 2010) and NomBank (Meyers et al., 2008). In lexicons of Slavic languages, valency of nouns or adjectives is only rarely covered, be it valency lexicons (Mel’čuk and Zholkovsky, 1984; Alberski et al., 2018) or general language dictionaries (Ivanová, 2020). Valency of Czech nouns and adjectives has been studied within various theoretical frameworks, e.g., the modified valency theory (Karlík, 2000), transformational generative grammar (Veselovská, 2001; Dvořák, 2016a,b), and the lexicological and “corpus-driven” approach (Čermák, 1991; Kopřivová, 2006; Čermáková, 2009). It is also covered by a printed valency …

Content truncated to 500 words