Syntax 1 Wiki: Week 4

Valence Properties of Verbs

All verbs in English need to have a subject. But verbs differ from each in other in whether they need to have complements, how many complements they need, and what kinds of complements they are. All the elements which a verb (or a word of another part of speech) can occur with are called its arguments. The information about which arguments a word takes is referred to as the word's argument structure.

Traditional Grammar already distinguishes between intransitive verbs like snore and transitive verbs like kiss. An intransitive verb like snore thus has an ARG-ST list with just the subject on it, i.e. a list of length 1, whereas a transitive verb has a list containing its subject and its direct object, i.e. a list of length 2.

Convince yourself that this is true by looking at these two verbs in one of our online grammars. Note that the ARG-ST list appears all the way at the bottom:

Argument Realization

Now we are going to do two exercises together:

We will look at a number of verbs in the Argument Realization Grammar. Their ARG-ST will be of different lengths.

1. Your first task is to find a systematic relationship between the semantic relation that the verb expresses and its ARG-ST.
2. There is also a systematic relationship between the verb's ARG-ST and its three valence lists SUBJ, SPR, and COMPS.

To find the generalization, you might want to ask yourself the following questions:

• What does the SPR list of verbs look like? Does it differ depending on the ARG-ST?
• What does the SUBJ list of verbs look like? How many elements are on it? Which element of the ARG-ST does the SUBJ realize?
• What does the COMPS list look like? How many elements are on it? Where can you find those elements on the ARG-ST.

Homework for Week 5

1. Work through the following sections of the Wiki:

Grammatical Functions

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