Valency (linguistics) - Types of Valency

Types of Valency

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

• an impersonal verb takes no arguments, 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 like in the example, The fool1 bet him2 five quid3 on ”The Daily Arabian”4 to win.

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.

That he came late did not surprise us.

Sam persuaded us to contribute to the cause.

The president mentioned that she would veto this bill.

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.

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.