Valency (linguistics)

In linguistics, verb valency or valence refers to the 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 derives from the definition of valency in chemistry. This scientific metaphor is due to Lucien Tesnière, who developed verb valency into a major component of his (what would later become known as)dependency grammar theory of syntax and grammar. The notion of valency first appeared as a comprehensive concept in Tesnière's posthumously published book (1959) Éléments de syntaxe structurale (Elements of structural syntax).[1]

Types of valency

There are several types of valency: impersonal (=avalent), intransitive (=monovalent), transitive (=divalent) and ditransitive (=trivalent):

an impersonal verb has no determinate subject, e.g. It rains. (Though it is technically the subject of the verb in English, it is only a dummy subject, that is a syntactic placeholder - it has no concrete referent. No other subject can replace it. In many other languages, there would be no subject at all. In Spanish, for example, It is raining could be expressed as simply llueve.)

an intransitive verb takes one argument, e.g. He1 sleeps.

a transitive verb takes two, e.g. He1 kicked the ball2.

a ditransitive verb takes three, e.g. He1 gave her2 a flower3.

There are a few verbs that take four arguments. Sometimes bet is considered to have four arguments in English, as in the examples I1 bet him2 five quid3 on ”The Daily Arabian”4 and I1 bet you2 two dollars3 it will rain4. Languages that mark arguments morphologically can have true "tritransitive" verbs, such as the causative of a ditransitive verb in Abaza (which incorporates all four arguments in the sentence "He couldn't make them give it back to her" as pronominal prefixes on the verb).[2]

The term valence also refers to the syntactic category of these elements. Verbs show considerable variety in this respect. In the examples above, the arguments are noun phrases (NPs). But arguments can in many cases be other categories, e.g.

Winning the prize made our training worthwhile. - Subject is a non-finite verb phrase

That he came late did not surprise us. - Subject is a clause

Sam persuaded us to contribute to the cause. - Object is a non-finite verb phrase

The president mentioned that she would veto this bill. - Object is a clause

Many of these patterns can appear in a form rather different from the ones just shown above. For example, they can also be expressed using the passive voice:

Our training was made worthwhile (by winning the prize).

We were not surprised (by the fact that he came late).

We were persuaded to contribute (by Sam).

That she would veto this bill was mentioned (by the president).

The above examples show some of the most common valence patterns in English, but do not begin to exhaust them. Other linguists have examined the patterns of more than three thousand verbs and place them in one or more of several dozen groups.[3]

The verb requires all of its 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 eats an apple, but may be reduced to monovalency in he eats. This is called valency reduction. In the southeastern United States, an emphatic trivalent form of eat is in use, as in I'll eat myself some supper. Verbs that are usually monovalent, like 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. Verb valence can also be described in terms of syntactic versus semantic criteria. The syntactic valency of a verb refers to the number of dependent arguments that the verb can have, while semantic valence describes the thematic relations associated with a verb.

Valency vs. subcategorization[edit]

Tesnière 1959[4] expresses the idea of valence as follows (translation from French):

"One can therefore compare the verb to a sort of atom with bonds, susceptible to exercising attraction on a greater or lesser number of actants. For these actants, the verb has a greater or lesser number of bonds that maintain the actants as dependents. The number of bonds that a verb has constitutes what we will call the valence of the verb."

Tesnière used the word actants to mean what are now widely called arguments (and sometimes complements). An important aspect of Tesnière's understanding of valency was that the subject is an actant (=argument, complement) of the verb in the same manner that the object is.[5] The concept of subcategorization, which is related to valency but associated more with phrase structure grammars than with the dependency grammar that Tesnière developed, did not originally view the subject as part of the subcategorization frame,[6] although the more modern understanding of subcategorization seems to be almost synonymous with valency.

Changing valency[edit]

All languages provide a means to change the valency of verbs. There are two ways to change the valency of a verb: reducing and increasing.[7]:72

Note that for this section, the labels S, A, and O will be used. These are commonly used names (taken from morphosyntactic alignment theory) given to arguments of a verb. S refers to the subject of an intransitive verb, A refers to the agent of a transitive verb, and O refers to the object of a transitive verb:

Lydia (S) is sleeping.

Don (A) is cooking dinner (O).

These are core arguments of a verb. Non-core (or peripheral) arguments are called obliques and are typically optional:

Lydia is sleeping on the couch.

Don is cooking dinner for his mom.

Valency reducing[edit]

Reducing valency involves moving an argument from the core to oblique status. The passive voice and antipassive voice are prototypical valency reducing devices.[7]:72 This kind of derivation applies most to transitive clauses. Since there are two arguments in a transitive clause, A and O, there are two possibilities for reducing the valency:

1. A is removed from the core and becomes an oblique. The clause becomes intransitive since there's only one core argument, the original O, which has become S. This is exactly what the passive voice does.[7]:73 The semantics of this construction emphasizes the original O and downgrades the original A and is used to avoid mentioning A, draw attention to O or the result of the activity.[7]:474

(a) Don (A) is cooking dinner (O).

(b) Dinner (S) is being cooked (by John).

2. O is moved from the core and becomes an oblique. Similarly, the clause becomes intransitive and the original A becomes S.[7]:73 The semantics of this construction emphasizes the original A and downgrades the original O and is used when the agent is doing something that has a patient, but that patient is given little or no attention.[7]:474These are found only in ergative–absolutive languages and are difficult to convey in English.

(a) Don (A) is crushing a soda can (O).

(b) Don (S) is crushing. [with the implication that a soda can is being crushed].

Note that this is not the same as an ambitransitive verb, which can be either intransitive or transitive (see criterion 4 below, which this does not meet).

There are some problems, however, with the terms passive and antipassive because they have been used to describe a wide range of behaviors across the world's languages. For example, when compared to a canonical European passive, the passive construction in other languages is justified in its name. However, when comparing passives across the world's languages, they do not share a single common feature.[8]:255

R. M. W. Dixon has proposed four properties of passives and antipassives.[9]:146

They apply to underlying transitive clauses and form a derived intransitive.

The underlying O of the passive and A of the antipassive become S.

The underlying A of the passive and O of the antipassive go into the periphery and are marked by a non-core case/preposition/etc. These can be omitted, but there's always the option of including them.

There is some explicit marking of the construction.

He acknowledges that this excludes some constructions labeled as "passive" by some linguists.

Other ways to reduce valency include the reflexives, reciprocals, inverse constructions, middle voice, object demotion, noun incorporation, and object incorporation.[10]:196–222

Valency increasing[ edit ]

Increasing valency involves moving an argument from the periphery into the core. applicatives and causatives are prototypical valency increasing devices.[7]:73

Valency in syntactic theory[edit]

Valence plays an important role in a number of the syntactic frameworks that have been developed in the last few decades. In Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar(GPSG),[11] many of the phrase structure rules generate the class of verbs with a particular valence. For example, the following rule generates the class of transitive verbs:

H stands for the head of the VP, that is the part which shares the same category as the VP, in this case, the verb. Some linguists objected that there would be one such rule for every valence pattern. Such a list would miss the fact that all such rules have certain properties in common. Work in Government and Binding (GB)[12] takes the approach of generating all such structures with a single schema, called the X-bar schema:[13]

X and Y can stand for a number of different lexical categories, and each instance of the symbol ’ stands for a bar. So A’, for instance, would be a kind of AP (adjective phrase). Two bars, used here for the complements, is thought by some linguists to be a maximal projection of a lexical category. Such a schema is meant to be combined with specific lexical rules and the projection principle to distinguish the various patterns of specific verbs.

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG)[14] introduces a handful of such schemata which aim to subsume all such valence related rules as well as other rules not related to valence. A network is developed for information related to specific lexical items. The network and one of the schemata aims to subsume the large number of specific rules defining the valence of particular lexical items.

Notice that the rule (VP → H NP [love]) and the schema (X’ → X, Y’’…) deal only with non-subject complements. This is because all of the above syntactic frameworks use a totally separate rule (or schema) to introduce the subject. This is a major difference between them and Tesnière's original understanding of valency, which included the subject, as mentioned above.

One of the most widely known versions of Construction Grammar (CxG)[15] also treats the subject like other complements, but this may be because the emphasis is more on semantic roles and compatibility with work in cognitive science than on syntax.

1. PHRASEOLOGY
AND PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS

Phraseology is a branch of linguistics which studies different types of set expressions, which like words name various objects and phenomena.

They exist in the language as ready-made units.

A Phraseological unit (PU) can be defined as a non-motivated word-group that cannot be freely made up in speech, but is reproduced as a ready-made unit.

It is a group of words whose meaning cannot be deduced by examining the meaning of the constituent lexemes.

The essential features of PU are:

1) lack of motivation;

2) stability of the lexical components.

A dark horse is actually not a horse but a person about whom no one knows anything definite.

A bull in a china shop: the idiom describes a clumsy person.

A white elephant – it is a waste of money because it is completely useless.

The green-eyed monster is jealousy, the image being drawn from Othello.

To let the cat out of the bag: to let some secret become known.

To bark up the wrong tree (Am) means ‘to follow a false scent; to look for somebody or something in a wrong place; to expect from somebody what he is unlikely to do’.

The idiom is not infrequently used in detective stories: The police are barking up the wrong tree as usual, i.e. they suspect somebody who has nothing to do with the crime.

The ambiguity of these interesting word-groups may lead to an amusing misunderstanding, especially for children who are apt to accept words at their face value.

- Little Johnnie (crying): Mummy, mummy, my auntie Jane is dead.

- Mother: Nonsense, child! She phoned me 5 minutes ago.

- Little Johnnie: But I heard Mrs. Brown say that her neighbours cut her dead.

To cut somebody dead means ‘to rudely ignore somebody; to pretend not to know or recognize him’.

Puns are frequently based on the ambiguousness of idioms:

- Isn’t our Kate a marvel! I wish you could have seen her at the Harrisons’ party yesterday. If I’d collected the bricks she dropped all over the place, I could built a villa’.

To drop a brick means ‘to say unintentionally a quite indiscreet or tactless thing that shocks and offended people’.

The author of the “Book of English Idioms” Collins write: “In standard spoken and written English today idioms is an established and essential element that, used with care, ornaments and enriches the language.”

Used with care is an important warning because speech overloaded with idioms loses its freshness and originality. Idioms, after all, are ready-made speech units, and their continual repetition sometimes wears them out: they lose their colours and become trite clichés.

In modern linguistics, there is considerable confusion about the terminology associated with these word-groups

Most Russian scholars use the term “phraseological units” introduced by academician V.V. Vinogradov.

The term “idiom” used by western scholars has comparatively recently found its way into Russian phraseology but is applied mostly to only a certain type of phraseological unit as it will be clear from further explanations.

There are some other terms: set-expressions, set-phrases, phrases, fixed word-groups, collocations.

The ‘freedom’ of free word-groups is relative and arbitrary.

Nothing is entirely ‘free’ in speech as its linear relationships are governed, restricted and regulated, on the one hand, by requirements of logic and common sense and, on the other, by the rules of grammar and combinability.

A black-eyed girl but not of a black-eyed table.

The child was glad is quite correct, but a glad child is wrong.

Free word-groups are so called not because of any absolute freedom in using them but simply because they are each time built up anew in the speech process whereas idioms are used as ready-made units with fixed and constant structures.

FREE-WORD GROUPS vs
PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS

The border-line between free or variable word-groups and phraseological units is not clearly defined.

The free word-groups are only relatively free as collocability of their member-words is fundamentally delimited by their lexical and syntactic valency.

Phraseological units are comparatively stable and semantically inseparable.

Between the extremes of complete motivation and variability of member-words and lack of motivation combined with complete stability of the lexical components and grammatical structure there are innumerable border-line cases.

o There are differences between word-groups and phraseological units

The difference often is in the interrelation of lexical components, e.g.: Blue ribbon (or red, brown, etc.),but blue ribbon – an honour given to the winner of the first prize in a competition – no substitution is possible in a phraseological unit;

Stretch one’s legs – размять ноги, прогуляться (а не «протянуть ноги»),

See eye to eye – быть полностью согласным (а не «видеться с глазу на глаз»),

Under one’s hand – за собственной подписью (а не «под рукой»),

Stew in one’s own juice – страдать по своей собственной глупости (а не «вариться в собственном соку»).

In free word-groups each of its constituents preserves its denotational meaning.

In the case of phraseological units however the denotational meaning belongs to the word-group as a single semantically inseparable unit. For example, compare a free word-group a white elephant (белый слон) and a phraseological unit white elephant (обуза, подарок, от которого не знаешь как избавиться).

o Distinctive features of
free-word groups and phraseological units

Free word-groups are but relatively free: they may possess some of the features characteristic of phraseological units.

On the other hand, phraseological units are heterogeneous. Alongside absolutely unchangeable phraseological units, there are expressions that allow some degree of substitution. Phraseology is concerned with all types of set expressions including those that stand for certain sentences.

o 3. CLASSIFICATIONS OF PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS

o 3.1. SEMANTIC CLASSIFICATION OF PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS (V.V. Vinogradov)

is based on the motivation of the unit

1. Phraseological fusions are units whose meaning cannot be deduced from the meanings of their component parts. The meaning of PFs is unmotivated at the present stage of language development, e.g.

red tape (бюрократизм, волокита),

a mare’s nest (иллюзия, нечто несуществующее),

My aunt! (вот те на!, вот так штука!, ну и ну!). The meaning of the components is completely absorbed by the meaning of the whole;

2. Phrasological unities are expressions the meaning of which can be deduced from the meanings of their components; the meaning of the whole is based on the transferred meanings of the components, e.g.

to show one’s teeth (to be unfriendly),

to stand to one’s guns (to refuse to change one’s opinion), etc.

They are motivated expressions.

3. Phraseological collocations are not only motivated but contain one component used in its direct meaning, while the other is used metaphorically, e.g. to meet requirements, to attain success.

In this group of PUs some substitutions are possible which do not destroy the meaning of the metaphoric element, e.g. to meet the needs, to meet the demand, to meet the necessity; to have success, to lose success.

These substitutions are not synonymical and the meaning of the whole changes, while the meaning of the verb meet and the noun success are kept intact.

o 3.2. STRUCTURAL CLASSIFICATION OF PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS (A.I. SMIRNITSKY)

Prof. A.I. Smirnitsky classified PUs as highly idiomatic set expressions functioning as word equivalents, and characterized by their semantic and grammatical unity. He suggested three classes of stereotyped phrases:

1. traditional phrases (nice distinction, rough sketch;

2. phraseological combinations (to fall in love, to get up);

Big bugs like him care nothing about small fry like ourselves (a) subject, b) prepositional object).

Proverbs, if viewed in their structural aspect, are sentences, and so cannot be used in the way in which phraseological units are used in the above examples.

o 2. Semantic aspect:

Proverbs could be best compared with minute fables for, like the latter, they sum up the collective experience of the community. Proverbs:

1. moralize: Hell is paved with good intentions.

2. give advice: Don’t judge a tree by its bark.

3. give warning: If you sing before breakfast, you will cry before night.

4. admonish: Liars should have good memories.

5. criticize: Everyone calls his own geese swans.

o A saying is any common, colloquial expression, or a remark often made, e.g.

1. That cat won’t jump.

2. Woe betide you!.

3. The fat is in the fire.

4. What will Mrs. Grundy say?

o Proverbs and sayings are introduced in speech ready-made, their components are constant, and their meaning is traditional and mostly figurative.

Proverbs often form the basis for phraseological units:

It’s the last straw that breaks the camel’s back:

the last straw.

There no use crying over spilt milk: cry over spilt milk, spilt milk.

Generally proverbs and sayings are emotionally coloured.

o Proverbs are short sayings that express popular wisdom, a truth or a moral lesson in a concise and imaginative way:

It never rains, but it pours.

Easy come, easy go.

A miss is as good as a mile.

Too many chiefs and not enough Indians.

Least said, soonest mended.

Practice what one peaches.

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

Charity begins at home.

o Many proverbs and sayings are metaphorical:

Time is money.

Little drops make the mighty ocean ( little drops).

Rome wasn’t built in a day. (a day);

Make the mighty ocean, building Rome ( a large task).

It takes two to tango ( (both parties involved in a situation or argument are equally responsible for it).

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