Barcelona, 8-9 September 2011 Valency Ambiguity Interpretation: What Can and What Cannot be Done Boris Iomdin (1), Leonid Iomdin (2) (1) Theoretical Semantics Department – Institute of Russian Language, Russian Academy of Sciences Moscow, Russia iomdin@ruslang.ru (2) Laboratory of Computational Linguistics – Institute for Information Transmission Problems, Russian Academy of Sciences Moscow, Russia iomdin@iitp.ru Abstract Russian constructions that involve the ambiguity of valencies are considered regarding the extent in which it can be successfully resolved by man or machine. The material includes two types of phenomena: 1) Russian counterparts of noun phrases like (a) the phases of sleep vs. (b) the phase of active sleep – in (a), sleep instantiates the subject valency of phase whereas in (b) sleep is the content of the phase; 2) subject and object infinitives with the verbs prosit’ ‘ask’ and predlagat’ ‘suggest/offer’: Rebënok prosit est’ lit.‘The child asks to eat’ vs. Rebënok prosit podojti lit.‘The child asks (for someone) to come up’, On predložil vstretit menja ‘he offered to meet me’ vs. On predložil prijti k nemu ‘he suggested that (I) should come round to him’. Keywords Valency structure, automatic disambiguation, human interpretation of texts, surface syntax, deep syntax, semantics, lexicography 1 Introductory Remarks Any language has certain constructions that are ambiguous with regard to how actants of situations represented are expressed. A classical case is subject/object ambiguity like support of the government (‘someone supports the government’ vs. ‘the government supports someone’) or the betrayal of her husband (who betrayed whom?). This phenomenon is much less common in English (because composite constructions like government support clear up some of the ambiguities) than in Russian, where it is fairly widespread, or in Latin, which 108