Abstract
Valency is one of the key aspects in the acquisition of a foreign language. For learners of a morphologically rich language such as Czech, valency patterns including requirements of specific nominal and verbal forms present a major challenge.
At the same time, the non-standard language use by the learners is an important source of knowledge about the acquisition of the specific language, useful for both theoretical and practical purposes, especially in teaching Czech as a foreign language. Our aim is to present a picture of how valency patterns used by learners of Czech, speakers of various first languages, differ from standard Czech.
The study is based on several resources documenting the language of foreign learners of Czech, namely those included in the two major learner corpora: CzeSL (http://utkl.ff.cuni.cz/learncorp/) and Merlin (http://www.merlin-platform.eu). We complement automatically assigned syntactic annotation by a manual analysis of errors, available for some parts of the available corpora.
Lexeme-specific valency patterns are compared across proficiency levels and native languages of the learners, and with comparable texts in standard Czech.