The Lexicographic Representation of Czech Diatheses: Rule Based Approach

In this paper, we propose a method of the representation of Czech diatheses in the valency lexicon of Czech verbs, VALLEX. Under the term diatheses, specific relations between uses of the same verb lexeme are considered here. These relations are associated with changes in valency frames of verbs which stem from the changes in the linking of situational participants, valency complementations and surface syntactic positions. We distinguish three types of Czech diatheses according to which linguistic means they are based on: (i) grammatical, (ii) syntactic and (iii) semantic diatheses. We demonstrate that in case of grammatical and syntactic diatheses, the changes in valency structure of verbs are regular enough to be captured by formal syntactic rules whereas the changes associated with semantic diatheses can be represented rather by lexical rules. In conclusion, we show that on certain conditions the different types of diatheses can be combined together.