Verb Valency and Argument Non-correspondence in a Bilingual Treebank

In this paper we present a contrastive study of one interesting non-correspondence between deep syntactic valency structures of two different languages. 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, particularly we aim our attention at the class of judgement verbs (in a broad sense). Considering this class of verbs, we analyze the relevant examples and discuss the nature of “the third argument” in the valency structure. As a result, we reconsider the conventions of argument labelling with the aim of achieving better consistency of annotation and we suggest possible ways of adjusting the valency theory itself to the needs of multilingual data.