Transitivity and valence
المؤلف:
PAUL R. KROEGER
المصدر:
Analyzing Grammar An Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
P69-C5
2025-12-16
23
Transitivity and valence
The concept of sub categorization is somewhat similar to the traditional classification of verbs as being either intransitive or transitive. The basic meaning of the term TRANSITIVE is “taking an object.” Thus, an intransitive verb (e.g. yawn) does not take any object, a transitive verb (e.g. like) requires one object, and a ditransitive verb requires two objects. We considered some ditransitive examples; these are repeated in (7):
(7) a Mary gave [her son]OBJ [a new bicycle]OBJ2.
b Reluctantly, Henry showed [Susan]OBJ [his manuscript]OBJ2.
c Uncle George told [the children]OBJ [a story]OBJ2.
Another way of specifying the transitivity of a verb is to ask, how many TERM (subject or object) arguments does it take? The number of terms, or direct arguments, is sometimes referred to as the VALENCE of the verb. Since most verbs can be said to have a subject, the valence of a verb is normally one greater than the number of objects it takes: an intransitive verb has a valence of one, a transitive verb has a valence of two, and a ditransitive verb has a valence of three.
It is important to notice that the valence of the verb (in this sense) is not the same as the number of arguments it takes. For example, the verb donate takes three semantic arguments, as illustrated in (8). However, donate has a valence of two because it takes only two term arguments, SUBJ and OBJ. With this predicate, the recipient is always expressed as an oblique argument.
Some linguists use the term “semantic valence” to refer to the number of semantic arguments which a predicate takes, and “syntactic valence” to specify the number of terms which a verb requires. We will use the term “valence” primarily in the latter (syntactic) sense.
To summarize, both valence and subcategorization tell us something about the number of arguments that must be expressed in a clause which contains a particular verb. However, there is an important difference between them. The valence of a verb tells us only the number of terms, or direct arguments; it says nothing about the presence or absence of oblique arguments. The subcategorization of a verb tells us all the Grammatical Relations which the verb assigns to its arguments, whether direct or oblique. So, for example, the verbs hit and put have the same valence (two), but different subcategorization sets, since put requires an oblique argument while hit does not, as shown in (9). (As a practice exercise, the reader should make up some example sentences to illustrate these argument structures.)
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