Distribution of Valency Complements in Czech Complex Predicates: Between Verb and Noun

In this paper, we focus on Czech complex predicates formed by a light verb and a predicative noun expressed as the direct object. Although Czech – as an inflectional language encoding syntactic relations via morphological cases – provides an excellent opportunity to study the distribution of valency complements in the syntactic structure with complex predicates, this distribution has not been described so far. On the basis of a manual analysis of the richly annotated data from the Prague Dependency Treebank, we thus formulate principles governing this distribution. In an automatic experiment, we verify these principles on well-formed syntactic structures from the Prague Dependency Treebank and the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank with very satisfactory results: the distribution of 97% of valency complements in the surface structure is governed by the proposed principles. These results corroborate that the surface structure formation of complex predicates is a regular process.