The paper examines the complexities of encoding verbal multiword expressions in the Croatian verb lexicon. The lexicon incorporates a verb’s description at the syntactic, morphological, and semantic levels. This study explores the treatment of reflexive verbs, light verb constructions, and verbal idioms across several Croatian and Slavic language resources to find the best solution for the verb lexicon. It addresses the following research questions: 1. How should reflexive verbs, i.e., verbs with the reflexive marker se, be treated? Should they be considered as separate lemmas, sublemmas of non-reflexive counterparts, or as one of their senses? 2. What syntactic label and semantic role should be assigned to a predicative noun in light verb constructions? 3. Should verbal idioms be included, and, if so, at which level of a description? Our conclusion is that all reflexive verbs should be treated as separate lemmas since they are distinct lexemes that have undergone semantic and syntactic change. To differentiate between a semantically full verb and a light verb, we have introduced the label LV and decided not to assign a semantic role to a predicative noun. By including verbal idioms and their translation into English, non-native users can benefit from the lexicon. The aim is to enhance the verb lexicon for the more effective description and recognition of verbal multiword expressions.

The distinction between arguments and adjuncts is a relevant topic in many linguistic theories (Tesniere, 1959; Chomsky, 1981; Langacker, 1987; Van Valin, 2001; Herbst, 2014, etc.). Even though theories provide similar definitions of arguments and adjuncts, sometimes it is difficult to draw a clear line between them. In order to determine ambiguous syntactic parts as arguments or adjuncts, various tests have been proposed, but they often give contradictory results and are not fully reliable. Nevertheless, they can be used as an auxiliary tool. The project Syntactic and Semantic Analysis of Arguments and Adjuncts in Croatian – SARGADA was launched with the aim of thoroughly investigating the distinction between arguments and adjuncts in Croatian, and to apply the theoretical results in a syntactic repository which would be a valuable resource for improving NLP tools and for researching and teaching Croatian. In this paper, we will present diagnostic tests chosen as a tool to distinguish between arguments and adjuncts in the Croatian language. The repository containing sentences with ambiguous syntactic phrases and our workflow will also be described.