There are several types of valency: • impersonal (= avalent) ''it's raining'' • intransitive (monovalent/monadic)
he sleeps • monotransitive (divalent/dyadic)
he kicks the ball • ditransitive and complex-transitive (trivalent/triadic)
he gave her a book and
they appointed Susan chairperson • tritransitive (quadrivalent/quadradic)
I bet him a dollar on a horse An
impersonal verb has no determinate subject, e.g. ''It's raining.
(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 some other languages, in which subjects are not syntactically obligatory, there would be no subject at all: The Spanish translation of It's raining
, for example, is a single verb form, Llueve''.) An
intransitive verb takes one argument, e.g.
He1 sleeps. A
monotransitive verb takes two, e.g.
He1 kicked the ball2. A
ditransitive verb takes three, e.g.
He1 gave her2 a flower3. There are quadrivalent verbs that take four arguments, also called
tritransitive verbs. Some schools of thought in descriptive linguistics consider
bet to be tritransitive in English and as having four arguments, as in the examples
I1 bet him2 five quid3 on ”The Daily Arabian”4 and
I1 bet you2 two dollars3 that it will rain4. Languages that mark arguments morphologically can have indisputable "true" tritransitive verbs, which have four necessary arguments. In that case, these arguments may be marked by particular morphology, and may, in the case of
polypersonal agreement, be inflected on the verb. For example, the usage of
causative morphology with a ditransitive verb in
Abaza produces tritranstivity (such as the translation of the sentence "He couldn't make them give it back to her", which incorporates all four arguments as pronominal prefixes on the verb).: p. 57 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 placed them in one or more of several dozen groups. 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 and type of dependent arguments that the verb can have, while semantic valence describes the
thematic relations associated with a verb. ==Compared with subcategorization==