The elaboration of linguistic theories depends on the existence of adequate descriptions of particular languages; otherwise theories will be poorly grounded on empirical data. This book starts from theoretical points of wide acceptance among linguists and goes on to present a descriptive metalanguage, able to express the facts of verb valency, which constitute one of the core areas in linguistic description. Most of the data come from an extensive survey under way of the valency of Portuguese verbs; but the present work’s relevance goes well beyond that, and incorporates a proposal applicable to other European languages, illustrated by the wealth of English examples included in the exposition. Among the topics discussed are the syntactic component of constructions (following here a proposal recently published in Culicover and Jackendoff’s Simpler Syntax); delimitation and definition of semantic roles; the role of linking rules and their relation to prototypes; and the connection between linguistic expressions and cognitive units such as frames and schemata. The result is a notational system flexible and robust enough to describe all aspects of verb valency.

This volume surveys a variety of verb valency change phenomena among diverse languages and from diverse theoretical viewpoints. It offers typological studies comparing languages in topics like applicative polysemy, complex predicate formation and locative alternation, but also works describing the different valency-changing operations in specific languages including West Circassian, Huasteca Nahuatl, Tlachichilco Tepehua and Seri, and works dealing with specific valency change constructions, such as tla- constructions in Nahuatl, resultatives in Yaqui, antipassives in Mocoví, and labile verbs in Arabic. This book aims to put this variety of backdrops in perspective and to clarify the notion and mechanisms of verb valency change. Both scholars and expert readers will get in these works a better understanding of the different verb valency changing operations and of the typological aspects involved in this phenomenon, together with a better grasp of how argument realization and verb morphology are connected in some languages.

In recent years, research on valency has led to important insights into the nature of language. Some of these findings are published in this volume for the first time with up-to-date accounts of language description and new reflections on language, above all for English and German. The volume also presents examples of contrastive analysis, which are of use for all those who deal professionally with these two languages. Furthermore, the articles in the psycholinguistic and computational linguistics section demonstrate the applicability and value of valency theory for these approaches and shed light on a fruitful cooperation between theoretical and descriptive linguistics and applied disciplines. The papers cover the following aspects of valency analysis: (i) theoretical aspects of the valency approach in relation to related theories of complementation (dependency syntax, FrameNet, case roles), (ii) descriptive aspects of valency and complementation, (iii) valency as a concept for the description of cognitive processes in syntactic processing, (iv) contrastive aspects of valency, above all for English and German, and (v) possible computational applications of the valency concept in fields such as automatic syntactic recognition or language processing. The volume combines papers of representatives from different linguistic schools on the topic of complementation. One of the aims is to show how concepts developed for the analysis of one language, in the case of valency often German, can be applied to other languages such as English.

This dictionary provides a valency description of English verbs, nouns and adjectives. Each entry contains a comprehensive list of the complementation patterns identified on the basis of the largest corpus of English available at the present time. All examples are taken directly from the COBUILD/Birmingham corpus. The valency description comprises statements about the quantitative valency of the lexical units established, an inventory of their obligatory, contextually optional and purely optional complements as well as systematic information on the semantic and collocational properties of the complements. An outline of the model of valency theory used in this dictionary is provided in the introduction.

The volume deals with valency phenomena in verbs and complex deverbal lexical structures (nominalizations, adjectivizations and synthetic compounds) in a variety of languages (English, Polish, Hungarian, Norwegian, Greek, Hebrew, Ga and Bantu languages). The proposed analyses are couched in lexically and syntactically driven approaches.

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Grammar, Style, Working Technique, grade: 1,7, RWTH Aachen University (Institut für Anglistik ), course: Syntactic Questions, language: English, abstract: Although the idea of valency is not new in the field of linguistics, it seems to have received relatively little attention up to now. Lucien Tesnière, who became known as the developer of the so called “dependency grammar”, was one of the first linguists who described the capacity of a verb to bind a certain number of “actants”1 (cf. Tesnière 1980, 385-386). In his posthumously published book “Eléments de syntaxe structurale”2 (1959) he called this phenomenon “valency”. Later on, other linguists adopted his notion, modified and adapted it. One of these linguists is Peter Eisenberg, a German philologist, who wrote some recent works on grammar in which the role of verb valency is often in the center of attention. Because a period of thirty years had passed since Tesnière’s first attempt to define the phenomenon of valency in linguistics, Eisenberg’s approach is a lot more detailed and includes different criteria for he had the opportunity to contribute his knowledge of other theories which were created after Tesnière’s book had been published. This term paper will draw a comparison of two works written by the authors mentioned above with special regard to the words which are dependent on verbs. Since the verb is often in the center of attention when the notion of valency is concerned, the group of the other words which are “governed” by the verb does not seem to be examined in the same way. Furthermore there does not even seem to be a standard term for such words (perhaps except for “arguments” (cf. Meyer 2005, 30), but even the notion of arguments is used in diverse ways), so that I will use the word “dependents” to refer to every possible linguistic element which can be bound by a verb. The main aim of this paper will not only be to provide a small overview of dependents in valency theories, but also to illustrate the pros and cons of each of these theories in a comparison at the end. To introduce the reader into the topic, a small overview of the notion of valency will be given at the beginning of the term paper. Later on, the most important aspects concerning dependents of both theories will be presented separately. After having compared the two works, pointed out the main discrepancies and having stated their benefits respectively their deficiencies, a final conclusion will be given.

Distinguished scholars examine the phenomena of passives and causatives in languages from around the world.