The CAVaL: Classical Armenian Valency Lexicon is an open-access digital tool for the study of valency classes of Classical Armenian. It was inspired by HoDeL: The Homeric Dependency Lexicon and continues an array of digital resources dedicated to the study of predicate-argument structures in individual languages and cross-linguistically, such as ValPaL: The Valency Patterns Leipzig, BivalTyp: Typological Database of Bivalent Verbs, PaVeDa: The Pavia Verbs Database, IT-VaLex: Index Thomisticus Valency Treebank for Latin.
As an online valency lexicon, CAVaL provides access to corpus-driven data on predicate-argument structures, their morphological, syntactic, and lexical properties. It facilitates research on a wide range of issues of Classical Armenian grammar relevant for general, historical and typological linguistics such argumental properties of verbs, functions of cases, relative frequency of coding patters etc.
CAVaL offers a flexible search interaface, which enables instant extraction of complete lists of occurrences of individual verbs specified for morphological, syntactic and lexical features of their syntactic dependencies. The usability is further enhanced by transliteration, grammatical glossing and translation of occurrences and visualization of predicate-argument structures (see How to Use).
CAVaL is based on a morphosyntactic treebank of Classical Armenian annotated according to the Universal Dependencies (UD) standard. The UD annotation has been to date applied to over 100 languages, including Modern Eastern Armenian and Modern Western Armenian, which makes it particularly suitable for CAVaL oriented towards comparative studies on valency classes. The UD annotation scheme relies on a dependency grammar framework that represents a sentence as a syntactic tree, which has exactly one word as its head and all other words of which are dependent on another word in the sentence (see general principles of the UD annotation and further details in de Marneffe et al. 2021). Some key features of the annotation scheme, relavant for the representation of valency frames, are outlined in How to Use.
The present pilot version of CAVaL includes the complete text of the Classical Armenian translation of the Gospels and the first ten chapters of History of the Armenians by Movses Khorenatsi. The text of the Gospels is based on the PROIEL treebank, which in turn relies on the digital edition by J.J.S. Weitenberg (TITUS) from B.O. Künzle. Das altarmenische Evangelium. Bern: Lang, 1984. The sentences from the Gospels are provided with the English translation from the King James Bible. The text of History of the Armenians and its English translation are based on the digital edition of Arak29.
Please cite CAVaL as follows:
Kocharov, Petr & Kharatyan, Lilit. Classical Armenian Valency Lexicon.
(Available online at https://caval.dch.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de, accessed on 25-05-2025)
Please contact us via email at petr.kocharov[at]uni-wuerzburg.de to let us know of possible errors or technical issues and share suggestions for further improvement.
