Valency (linguistics)

Transitivity and valency
Transitivity
Intransitive verb Transitive verb Ditransitive verb
Valence increasing
Causative Applicative Benefactive Dative shift
Valence decreasing
Passive Antipassive Impersonal passive
Reflexives and reciprocals
Reflexive pronoun Reflexive verb Reciprocal construction Reciprocal pronoun
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In linguistics, valency or valence is the number and type of arguments and complements controlled by a predicate, content verbs being typical predicates. Valency is related, though not identical, to subcategorization and transitivity, which count only object arguments – valency counts all arguments, including the subject. The linguistic meaning of valency derives from the definition of valency in chemistry. Like valency found in chemistry, there is the binding of specific elements. In the grammatical theory of valency, the verbs organize sentences by binding the specific elements. Examples of elements that would be bound would be the complement and the actant.^[1] Although the term originates from valence in chemistry, linguistic valency has a close analogy in mathematics under the term arity.^[2]

The valency metaphor appeared first in linguistics in Charles Sanders Peirce's essay "The Logic of Relatives" in 1897,^[3] and it then surfaced in the works of a number of linguists decades later in the late 1940s and 1950s.^[4] Lucien Tesnière is credited most with having established the valency concept in linguistics.^[5] A major authority on the valency of the English verbs is Allerton (1982), who made the important distinction between semantic and syntactic valency.