Discover

In linguistics, 'verb valency' or 'valence' refers to number of arguments controlled by a verbal predicate. It is related, though not identical, to verb transitivity, which counts only object arguments of the verbal predicate. Verb valency, on the other hand, includes all arguments, including the subject of the verb.
The linguistic meaning of valence is derived from the definition of valency in chemistry.

Contents

Types of valency

Lexical valency

See also

External links

Types of valency

There are several types of valency:

★ An 'avalent' verb takes no arguments, e.g. ''It rains.'' (Though ''it'' is technically the subject of the verb, it is only a dummy subject, and doesn't have a true meaning.)

★ A 'monovalent' verb takes one argument, e.g. ''He sleeps.''

★ A 'divalent' verb takes two, e.g. ''He kicks the ball.''

★ A 'trivalent' verb takes three, e.g. ''He gives her a flower.''
The verb requires all of these arguments in a well-formed sentence, although they can sometimes undergo valency reduction or expansion.
For instance, ''to eat'' is naturally divalent, as in ''he is eating an apple'', but may be reduced to monovalency in ''he is eating in the garden''. ''In the garden'' here is not a verb argument, and hence not an element of valency. This is called 'valency reduction'.
Verbs that are usually monovalent, like ''to sleep'', cannot take a direct object. However, there are cases where the valency of such verbs can be expanded, for instance in ''He sleeps the sleep of death.'' This is called 'valency expansion'.

Lexical valency

The term valence has a related technical meaning in lexical semantics that elaborates on the role of argument structure - it refers to the capacity of other lexical units to combine with the given word. For instance, valence is one of the elements defining a construction in some Construction Grammars. This sense of the term, sometimes called Lexical Valency, is related to the above, but is far richer than the numerical notion inherited from chemistry.

See also

★ Verb argument

★ Arity

★ Verb

★ Morphosyntactic alignment

★ Transitivity (grammatical category)

External links

★ English Valency Structures - A first sketch

★ The difference between lexical and grammatical valency

★ What is valency?