Introducing PaVeDa – Pavia Verbs Database: Valency Patterns and Pattern Comparison in Ancient Indo-European Languages

The paper introduces PaVeDa, a resource that builds on the ValPaL database of verbs’ valency patterns and alternations by adding a number of ancient languages (completely absent from ValPaL) and a number of new features that enable direct comparison, both diachronic and synchronic. For each verb, ValPaL contains the basic frame and ideally all possible valency alternations allowed by the verb (e.g. passive, causative, reflexive etc.). In order to enable comparison among alternations, an additional level has been added, the alternation class, that overcomes the issue of comparing language specific alternations which were added by individual contributors of ValPaL. The ValPaL had as its main aim typological comparison, and data collection was variously carried out using questionnaires, secondary sources and largely drawing on native speakers’ intuition by contributors. Working with ancient languages entails a methodological change, as the data is extracted from corpora. This has led to re-thinking the notion of valency as a usage-based feature of verbs and to planning future addition of corpus data to modern languages in the database. It further shows the impact of ancient languages on theoretical reflection.