The aim of this paper is to argue for a coherent Universal Dependencies approach to the core vs. non-core distinction. We demonstrate inconsistencies in the current version 2 of UD in this respect – mostly resulting from the preservation of the argument–adjunct dichotomy despite the declared avoidance of this distinction – and propose a relatively conservative modification of UD that is free from these problems.

This is a summary of an invited talk.

This paper presents Walenty, a comprehensive valence dictionary of Polish, with a number of novel features, as compared to other such dictionaries. The notion of argument is based on the coordination test and takes into consideration the possibility of diverse morphosyntactic realisations. Some aspects of the internal structure of phraseological (idiomatic) arguments are handled explicitly. While the current version of the dictionary concentrates on syntax, it already contains some semantic features, including semantically defined arguments, such as locative, temporal or manner, as well as control and raising, and work on extending it with semantic roles and selectional preferences is in progress. Although Walenty is still being intensively developed, it is already by far the largest Polish valence dictionary, with around 8600 verbal lemmata and almost 39 000 valence schemata. The dictionary is publicly available on the Creative Commons BY SA licence and may be downloaded from http://zil.ipipan.waw.pl/Walenty.

While it is possible to build a formal grammar manually from scratch or, going to another extreme, to derive it automatically from a treebank, the development of the LFG grammar of Polish presented in this paper is different from both of these methods as it relies on extensive reuse of existing language resources for Polish. LFG grammars minimally provide two levels of representation: constituent structure (c-structure) produced by context-free phrase structure rules and functional structure (f-structure) created by functional descriptions. The c-structure was based on a DCG grammar of Polish, while the f-structure level was mainly inspired by the available HPSG analyses of Polish. The morphosyntactic information needed to create a lexicon may be taken from one of the following resources: a morphological analyser, a treebank or a corpus. Valence information from the dictionary which accompanies the DCG grammar was converted so that subcategorisation is stated in terms of grammatical functions rather than categories; additionally, missing valence frames may be extracted from the treebank. The obtained grammar is evaluated using constructed testsuites (half of which were provided by previous grammars) and the treebank.