Light verb constructions (LVCs) pose a serious challenge for both theoretical and applied linguistics as their syntactic structures are not solely determined by verbs alone but also by predicative nouns. In this contribution, we introduce an initial step to a new formal lexicographic representation of LVCs for the valency lexicon of Czech verbs, VALLEX.
The main idea underlying our representation is to decompose the information on an LVC between (i) the verbal valency frame and (ii) the nominal valency frame. Both deep and surface syntactic structures of LVCs can be easily derived from the information given in the verbal and nominal frames by application of formal rules as they are introduced in this contribution.