On the Non-canonical Valency Filling

Valency slot filling is a semantic glue, which brings together the meanings of words. As regards the position of an argument in the dependency structure with respect to its predicate, there exist three types of valency filling: active (canonical), passive, and discontinuous. Of these, the first type is studied much better than the other two. As a rule, canonical actants are unambiguously marked in the syntactic structure, and each actant corresponds to a unique syntactic position. Linguistic information on which syntactic function an actant might have (subject, direct or indirect object), what its morphological form should be and which prepositions or conjunctions it requires, can be given in the lexicon in the form of government patterns, subcategorization frames, or similar data structures. We concentrate on non-canonical cases of valency filling in Russian, which are characteristic of nonverbal parts of speech, such as adverbs, adjectives, and particles, in the first place. They are more difficult to handle than canonical ones, because the position of the actant in the tree is governed by more complicated rules. A valency may be filled by expressions occupying different syntactic positions, and a syntactic position may accept expressions filling different valencies of the same word. We show how these phenomena can be processed in a semantic analyzer.