Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics

In Slavic and Germanic languages, verbs are frequently formed by the addition of a prefix or a verb particle to the base verb (e.g., hodit ‘throw’ > vy-hodit ‘throw out’, werfen ‘throw’ > aus-werfen ‘throw out’, throw > throw out). Slavic and Germanic prefixes and verb-particles have previously been observed to have similar effects in terms of the changes to the base verbs’ valency (i.e., their potential to require certain types of syntactic elements) that may accompany the word-formation process. In this talk, I will present a way of approaching this issue from a data-based perspective. I carry out a case study on three languages – Czech, German and English – which are included in SynSemClass, a lexical resource which groups verbs into semantic classes and includes links to entries in valency lexicons for the verbs’ individual senses. This resource makes it possible to carry out an analysis of the valency changes on the level of individual semantically related valency frames, as well as to deal with the differences in descriptions in the individual languages’ valency lexicons, and compare the types of changes across languages.

*** The talk will be delivered in person (MFF UK, Malostranské nám. 25, 4th floor, room S1) and will be streamed via Zoom. For details how to join the Zoom meeting, please write to sevcikova et ufal.mff.cuni.cz ***