Funding: National Recovery and Resilience Plan 2021–2026, NextGenerationEU

Host institution: Institute of the Croatian Language

Project duration: 1 January 2023 – 31 December 2027

Within the project, the Verbion valency database will be developed. It will contain verbs grouped into semantic classes, with associated inflectional forms, meanings, valency patterns, and examples for each valency pattern. On the basis of these examples, the argument structure of verbs will be defined, i.e. the types of syntactic phrases and semantic roles. Data from the most important categories will be translated into English in order to facilitate interoperability with other similar resources and to enable the database to be used in language learning. The database will include 500 verbs with morphological information and meanings, while 200 verbs will receive a detailed valency description. In addition to Verbion, the project will yield theoretical research on the semantic properties of verbs, similarities and differences among near-synonymous verbs, and the relations of synonymy, polysemy, troponymy, metaphor and metonymy, as well as studies of syntactic alternations and other grammatical phenomena.

The results of this project will also be used in other linguistic research dealing with semantics and syntax, as well as in improving the lexicographic description of verbs. They will benefit teachers of Croatian, students of Croatian and other language-related disciplines, foreign Slavists and other linguists, as well as non-native speakers aiming to master the transfer of patterns from their mother tongue into a second language.

This project is associated with the project Semantic–Syntactic Classification of Verbs in Croatian (SEMTACTIC), funded by the Croatian Science Foundation (IP-2022-10-8074).