Multilingual Features of Complex Valency Frames

In this paper we deal with the verb valency lexicon of Czech verbs named VerbaLex, which contains complex valency verb frames (CVFs) including both surface and deep valencies. The most notable features of CVFs include two-level semantic labels with linkage to the Princeton and EuroWordNet Top Ontology hierarchy and the corresponding surface verb frame patterns capturing the morphological cases that are typical of the highly inflected languages like Czech. We discuss the assumption that CVFs are suitable for a description of the predicate-argument structure not only of Czech verbs but also verbs in other languages, particularly Bulgarian, Romanian and English. We come to the conclusion that this hypothesis can be verified reliably enough exploiting the principle of translatability and also indirectly using semantic classes of (Czech) verbs.