Abstract
This chapter studies the analysis of verb valency, which is at the root of most of the theoretical and practical positions held in the present book, and provides most of the evidence for its support. The main points of valency analysis are described, with the addition of several new important considerations which resulted from research on the topic in the last 5 years. It starts with the definition of diatheses, that is, constructions that have the property of subclassifying verbs by distinguishing those that occur in the construction and those that do not. Each verb can occur in one, more often in several diatheses, and the set of all diatheses of a verb is its valency. Diatheses are expressed as symbolic associations: a morphosyntactic structure and a set of thematic relations, each assigned to one of the complements of the sentence. The morphosyntactic component is comparatively simple, and basically well understood; but the set of thematic relations, and the ways they come to be assigned to their complements is a surprisingly complex system, not properly described in the current literature. This chapter begins the study of the assignment system, to be continued in subsequent chapters.
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- 1.
- 2.
By “traditional” I mean the linguistic work in the recent decades in general, not only the so-called “traditional grammar.”
- 3.
This analysis works for spoken Brazilian Portuguese; it may be different for other languages.
- 4.
The clitic pronouns current in the spoken language are: me “me,” te “you (object),” nos “us,” and se, which is the third person reflexive. Some dialects also have lhe, often used as an alternative form of te.
- 5.
Here “underlies” has no transformational connotation; it is just short for “is the syntactic/symbolic analysis of.”
- 6.
In the Dictionary this is expressed by assigning both the role αRef (alpha-referential). In Chap. 13 an alternative analysis for these cases is proposed.
- 7.
There are some additional elements, such as the negative particle; but these are not bearers of thematic relations, and can be ignored for our purposes.
- 8.
Two terms in a symbolic relation define what is called a sign in Saussure’s terminology. The concepts and terms symbolic and elaboration (elaborate vs. schematic) are taken from Langacker (1987, 1991, 2008). As for the term schematic, it has an unfortunate connection with the word schema, and after all elaborate relations are also present in schemata. Perhaps it might be better to speak of hyperonymic relations, as opposed to elaborate ones, but schematic seems to be in general use, and will be used here as well.
- 9.
Perhaps also in imperatives.
- 10.
Theme is the semantic role of the element undergoing motion. In sentence [12], [13] applies only to the subordinate clause.
- 11.
I thank Lúcia Fulgêncio for insisting on the importance of this factor.
- 12.
Something like ∗I am fond plums.
References
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Perini, M. A. (2015). Describing verb valencies: Practical and theoretical issues. Cham: Springer.
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Perini, M.A. (2019). Valency. In: Thematic Relations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28538-8_5
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