Resources in Conflict: A Bilingual Valency Lexicon vs. a Bilingual Treebank vs. a Linguistic Theory

AbstractIn this paper, we would like to exemplify how a syntactically annotated bilingual treebank can help us in exploring and revising a developed linguistic theory. On the material of the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank we observe sentences in which an Addressee argument in one language is linked translationally to a Patient argument in the other one, and make generalizations about the theoretical grounds of the argument non-correspondences and its relations to the valency theory beyond the annotation practice. Exploring verbs of three semantic classes (Judgement verbs, Teaching verbs and Attempt Suasion verbs) we claim that the Functional Generative Description argument labelling is highly dependent on the morphosyntactic realization of the individual participants, which then results in valency frame differences. Nevertheless, most of the differences can be overcome without substantial changes to the linguistic theory itself.