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. Technically speaking, all our verbs have a feature ARG-ST (= argument structure), which is a list of all the verb's arguments.

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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