CROATPAS: A Lexicographic Resource for Croatian Verbs and its Potential for Croatian Language Teaching

This paper revolves around CROATPAS (Marini & Ježek 2019), a digital lexicographic resource for Croatian verbs able to frame verbal polysemy and metonymic shifts, which is currently being developed at the University of Pavia. Just like its Italian sister resource T-PAS (Ježek et al. 2014), CROATPAS is a corpus-derived collection of verb argument structures whose argument slots have been manually annotated using a specific set of semantic labels called Semantic Types. At the moment, the resource contains 101 verb entries linked to 457 different verb senses (called patterns) and over 22,000 annotated corpus lines (Marini & Ježek 2020). The possible applications of CROATPAS are endless. However, given the status of Croatian as an under-resourced and Less Commonly Taught Language, this paper focuses on its potential as a language teaching tool, putting forward some hypothetical vocabulary and grammar teaching suggestions. Even though CROATPAS is still in the early stages, its user-friendly interface, bilingual nature and focus on verb semantics bode well for its future as a tool for the teaching of Croatian as a Foreign Language.