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.

In feature structures, the arguments of the verb are described by three so-called valence features: SUBJ, SPR, and COMPS. We will explain SPR later and here concentrate on the other two. In school you learned that traditional grammar distinguishes between intransitive verbs like snore and transitive verbs like kiss. These verbs can be used as follows:

Intransitive verb:

(1) Lilly snored. (2) *Lilly snored Fido.

Transitive verb:

(3) *Lilly kissed. (4) Lilly kissed Fido.

(1)-(2) show that an intransitive verb can (in fact, must) have a subject, but is not allowed to have a direct object. (3)-(4) show that, in contrast, transitive verbs must have both a subject and a direct object.

With the use of the valence features, we can capture the similarity and difference between intransitive and transitive verbs. All valence features take a list as value. To express that all verbs must have one and only one subject, we require their SUBJ list to be the following:

SUBJ <NP> .

The COMPS lists of intransitive verbs will look different, however:

Intransitive: COMPS < >
Transitive: COMPS <NP>

When we put the subject and compliment information together for both types of verbs, we get the following result:

Intransitive verbs:

SUBJ <NP>
COMPS < >

Transitive verbs:

SUBJ <NP>
COMPS <NP >

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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