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 sum of all the arguments are called the word's valence.
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 as follows:
SUBJ <NP>
The COMPS lists of intransitive and transitive verbs must look different, however:
Intransitive: COMPS < >
Transitive: COMPS <NP>
When we put the subject and complement 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 the Online Grammar.
Now we are going to do an exercise together:
We will look at a number of verbs in the Online Grammar. Their SUBJ lists will all have the same length but their COMPS lists may be of different lengths.
Exercise
Find a systematic relationship between the semantic relation that the verb expresses and its valence (we continue to ignore the valence feature SPR for now). You find the semantic information as the value of the feature CONT.
To find the generalization, you might want to ask yourself the following questions:
- How many elements are on the SUBJ list?
- How many elements are on the COMPS list?
Homework for Week 5
1. Work through the following sections of the Wiki:
Navigation: