Towards a Semi-Automatic Detection of Reflexive and Reciprocal Constructions and Their Representation in a Valency Lexicon
Abstract
Valency lexicons usually describe valency behavior of verbs in non-reflexive and non-reciprocal constructions. However, reflexive and reciprocal constructions are common morphosyntactic forms of verbs.
Both of these constructions are characterized by regular changes in morphosyntactic properties of verbs, thus they can be described by grammatical rules. On the other hand, the possibility to create reflexive and/or reciprocal constructions cannot be trivially derived from the morphosyntactic structure of verbs as it is conditioned by their semantic properties as well.
A large-coverage valency lexicon allowing for rule based generation of all well formed verb constructions should thus integrate the information on reflexivity and reciprocity. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic procedure, based on grammatical constraints on reflexivity and reciprocity, detecting those verbs that form reflexive and reciprocal constructions in corpus data.
However, exploitation of corpus data for this purpose is com