Introduction -- the Basic Notions

The definitions of terms used in this article are based on their linguistic equivalents. The idea of valencies is in a certain sense similar to the semantic cases and verb frames [1]. The difference between them lies in the orientation of valencies to the syntactic information stored in the part of sentence that is described by valency. Therefore it is possible to discover valencies in sentences using an automatic corpus processing. We suppose that valencies are more appropriate for a language like Czech, where a substantial part of the verb meaning can be derived from information determined already by morphological analysis from word endings of the ``arguments'' of the verb.

The definitions:

valency, valency pattern

-- a set of valency expressions (e.g. the verb informovat (inform) has three different valencies-- <koho>, <koho>-<okom|cem> and <koho>-$(ze) (somebody, somebody-about something somebody, somebody-that))

valency expression

-- a formal notation of a noun or adverb group or a clause, that expresses the requested obligatory attributes of the group or clause (e.g. in the previous definition <koho> (whom) is a valency expression that represents a noun group in accusative denoting a person and $(ze) (that) represents a clause starting with conjunction ze)

valency valid for a verb

-- valency that expresses a scheme of a semantically correct part of sentence which relates the given verb and appropriate noun or adverb groups or clauses (e.g. all three valencies in the first definition are valid for the verb informovat, valency <komu>-$(aby) (to somebody, so as to) is not valid for this verb)