The role of verb valency in Croatian and Russian learning at B1 level

Abstract

Difficulties in learning a second language (L2) may arise when a first-language (L1) speaker attempts to directly transfer a syntactic pattern from L1 into L2. Since there is a very high overlap in verb valency between Croatian and Russian, the generalization of syntactic patterns often leads to systematic errors. In this paper we analyze verbs that were selected from a list of verbs required for B1-level mastery in Croatian and Russian. The analyzed verbs are divided into semantic groups according to Levin (1993), but the paper focuses on the verbs of social interaction, verbs of communication and psych-verbs. Each verb is associated with its syntactic pattern supported by a corpus attestation. Within each semantic group, verbs are further divided into four groups based on the number of complements and their realization on the syntactic and morphological levels. This paper aims to facilitate the acquisition of basic verb complements in Croatian and Russian, with emphasis on non-matching pairs between the two languages. Keywords: Verb valency, Croatian language, Russian language, L2 acquisition