Based on an empirical study of English verbs, the author discusses to what extent complementation is predictable from meaning by examining whether semantically similar verbs also exhibit the same syntactic properties. The significant number of idiosyncrasies presented rigorously challenge approaches that assume meaning to be the determining force in complementation.

This dictionary provides a valency description of English verbs, nouns and adjectives. Each entry contains a comprehensive list of the complementation patterns identified on the basis of the largest corpus of English available at the present time. All examples are taken directly from the COBUILD/Birmingham corpus. The valency description comprises statements about the quantitative valency of the lexical units established, an inventory of their obligatory, contextually optional and purely optional complements as well as systematic information on the semantic and collocational properties of the complements. An outline of the model of valency theory used in this dictionary is provided in the introduction.

In recent years, research on valency has led to important insights into the nature of language. Some of these findings are published in this volume for the first time with up-to-date accounts of language description and new reflections on language, above all for English and German. The volume also presents examples of contrastive analysis, which are of use for all those who deal professionally with these two languages. Furthermore, the articles in the psycholinguistic and computational linguistics section demonstrate the applicability and value of valency theory for these approaches and shed light on a fruitful cooperation between theoretical and descriptive linguistics and applied disciplines. The papers cover the following aspects of valency analysis: (i) theoretical aspects of the valency approach in relation to related theories of complementation (dependency syntax, FrameNet, case roles), (ii) descriptive aspects of valency and complementation, (iii) valency as a concept for the description of cognitive processes in syntactic processing, (iv) contrastive aspects of valency, above all for English and German, and (v) possible computational applications of the valency concept in fields such as automatic syntactic recognition or language processing. The volume combines papers of representatives from different linguistic schools on the topic of complementation. One of the aims is to show how concepts developed for the analysis of one language, in the case of valency often German, can be applied to other languages such as English.

Valency patterns and valency orientation have been frequent topics of research under different perspectives, often poorly connected. Diachronic studies on these topics is even less systematic than synchronic ones. The papers in this book bring together two strands of research on valency, i.e. the description of valency patterns as worked out in the Leipzig Valency Classes Project (ValPaL), and the assessment of a language's basic valency and its possible orientation. Notably, the ValPaL does not provide diachronic information concerning the valency patterns investigated: one of the aims of the book is to supplement the available data with data from historical stages of languages, in order to make it profitably exploitable for diachronic research. In addition, new research on the diachrony of basic valency and valency alternations can deepen our understanding of mechanisms of language change and of the propensity of languages or language families to exploit different constructional patterns related to transitivity.

In recent years, issues of verbal valency, valency alternations and verb classes have seen a new upsurge of interest from a variety of perspectives. This book comprises articles investigating valency phenomena on a contrastive basis within Romance, Germanic and Slavic, and also in Basque and in the West-African language Ga, as well as classical Greek and Sanskrit. Phenomena include transitive and ditransitive constructions and alternations, involving reflexives, cognate objects, ’null’ objects, case (in its syntagmatic and paradigmatic aspects), and infinitives, mostly in a synchronic perspective. Aiming at a closer understanding of the range of regularities falling within the concept of valency frames, the book offers a representative array of current assumptions, hypotheses, methodologies and new findings within the overall field. The volume will provide a valuable resource for researchers and students both in general linguistics and in the relevant language particular disciplines.

The volume deals with valency phenomena in verbs and complex deverbal lexical structures (nominalizations, adjectivizations and synthetic compounds) in a variety of languages (English, Polish, Hungarian, Norwegian, Greek, Hebrew, Ga and Bantu languages). The proposed analyses are couched in lexically and syntactically driven approaches.

Distinguished scholars examine the phenomena of passives and causatives in languages from around the world.