Valency (linguistics) - Valency Vs. Subcategorization

Valency Vs. Subcategorization

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

"One can therefore compare the verb to a sort of atom with hooks, susceptible to exercising attraction on a greater or lesser number of actants. For these actants, the verb has a greater or lesser number of hooks that maintain the actants as dependents. The number of hooks 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. 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, although the more modern understanding of subcategorization seems to be almost synonymous with valency.