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

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.