Goals
The Classical Armenian Valency Lexicon Project (CAVaL) is an open-access digital tool for the study of valency classes of Classical Armenian.
The project was inspired by HoDeL: The Homeric Dependency Lexicon and continues an array of online resources dedicated to the study of verbal arguments cross-linguistically and in individual languages, see 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 a valency lexicon, CAVaL provides access to the corpus-driven data on predicate-argument structures, their morpholosyntactic encoding and lexical features. The data allow to tackle a wide range of research questions of the Classical Armenian grammar, which are relevant for general, historical and typological linguistics (see Malchukov A. & Comrie B. (eds.), Valency Classes in the World’s Languages. De Gruyter, 2015; Luraghi S. & Roma E. (eds.), Valency over Time. De Gruyter, 2021 among many others).
CAVaL is based on a treebank of Classical Armenian annotated following the Universal Dependencies guidelines (see Annotation). The UD framework of morphosyntactic annotation has been to date applied to over 100 languages, including the Modern Armenian literary languages, which makes it particularly suitable for a project oriented towards the cross-language comparison of valency classes.
The pilot version of CAVaL is based on the Classical Armenian translation of the Gospels (see Texts). Next instalments of CAVaL will include the writings by Eznik Kołbacՙi, Agatՙangełos, and Movsēs Khorenacՙi.
CAVaL offers a flexible system of filters, which provide an instant access to data on the valency classes of Classical Armenian with frequency information and access to complete lists of morphologically glossed textual attestations in the project corpus (see How to Use).
Team
Petr Kocharov, Ph.D. (Universität Würzburg page)
Lilit Kharatyan, M.A. (Universität Würzburg page)
Acknowledgements
The project is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), project 518003859, 2023–2025
We acknowledge indispensable help on behalf of the HoDeL: The Homeric Dependency Lexicon project at the stages of project design and implementation.
We thank Arak29 Charitable Foundation for the permission to reuse Bible, 12 Armenian histories, other concordances, and related materials published within the Arak29 project for non-profit purposes.