Валентность и изоморфизм<br>(Valency and isomorphism)

Abstract

Valency relations in a paraphrase should match those of the source expres- sion. This kind of isomorphism is investigated in the present article.In the passive sentence The plant was visited by Putin the relation between Putin and plant is the same as in the corresponding active sentence. It is not equally easy to see how isomorphism can be preserved in, for example, Who is the author of these lines?, derived from Who wrote these lines? This is achieved by introducing a new concept of basic semantic unit. Obviously, the predicate write, which is explicit in the source expression, must somehow be introduced in the semantic representation of the para- phrase. There are two ways of accounting for this "missing" predicate. It can either be extracted (computed) from the words author and lines and assume the form of an implicit predicate, or the corresponding meaning can be car- ried by an agreement morpheme attached to the noun author (in the Russian paraphrase this noun is marked with the so-called agreement case). The first actant of write needs to be represented only once - through the word who - and therefore the noun author is assigned syntactic status, which means that it does not occupy a node of its own in the semantic graph.A number of further examples - not only sentences, but also phrases and words - are analysed in order to illustrate different cases of isomor- phism.