In this paper, we would like to exemplify how a syntactically annotated bilingual treebank can help us in exploring and revising a developed linguistic theory. On the material of the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank we observe sentences in which an Addressee argument in one language is linked translationally to a Patient argument in the other one, and make generalizations about the theoretical grounds of the argument non-correspondences and its relations to the valency theory beyond the annotation practice. Exploring verbs of three semantic classes (Judgement verbs, Teaching verbs and Attempt Suasion verbs) we claim that the Functional Generative Description argument labelling is highly dependent on the morphosyntactic realization of the individual participants, which then results in valency frame differences. Nevertheless, most of the differences can be overcome without substantial changes to the linguistic theory itself.

We introduce a substantial update of the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank, a parallel corpus manually annotated at the deep syntactic layer of linguistic representation. The English part consists of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) section of the Penn Treebank. The Czech part was translated from the English source sentence by sentence. This paper gives a high level overview of the underlying linguistic theory (the so-called tectogrammatical annotation) with some details of the most important features like valency annotation, ellipsis reconstruction or coreference.

We explore the potential and limitations of a concept of building a bilingual valency lexicon based on the alignment of nodes in a parallel treebank. Our aim is to build an electronic Czech->English Valency Lexicon by collecting equivalences from bilingual treebank data and storing them in two already existing electronic valency lexicons, PDT-VALLEX and Engvallex. For this task a special annotation interface has been built upon the TrEd editor, allowing quick and easy collecting of frame equivalences in either of the source lexicons. The issues encountered so far include limitations of technical character, theory-dependent limitations and limitations concerning the achievable degree of quality of human annotation. The issues of special interest for both linguists and MT specialists involved in the project include linguistically motivated non-balance between the frame equivalents, either in number or in type of valency participants. The first phases of annotation so far attest the assumption that there is a unique correspondence between the functors of the translation-equivalent frames. Also, hardly any linguistically significant non-balance between the frames has been found, which is partly promising considering the linguistic theory used and partly caused by little stylistic variety of the annotated corpus texts.