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In linguistics, verb valency or valence refers to the number of arguments controlled by a verbal predicate. It is related, though not identical, to verb transitivity, which counts only object arguments of the verbal predicate. Verb valency, on the other hand, includes all arguments, including the subject of the verb. The linguistic meaning of valence derives from the definition of valency in chemistry. This scientific metaphor is due to Lucien Tesnière, who developed verb valency into a major component of his (what would later become known as) dependency grammar theory of syntax and grammar. The notion of valency first appeared as a comprehensive concept in Tesnière's posthumously published book (1959) ''Éléments de syntaxe structurale'' (Elements of structural syntax).〔For a discussion of valency from the traditional perspective of dependency grammar, see Fischer and Ágel (2010).〕 ==Types of valency== There are several types of valency: impersonal (=avalent), intransitive (=monovalent), transitive (=divalent), ditransitive (=trivalent) and tritransitive (=quadrivalent): :: *an impersonal verb has no determinate subject, e.g. ''It rains.'' (Though ''it'' is technically the subject of the verb in English, it is only a dummy subject, that is a syntactic placeholder - it has no concrete referent. No other subject can replace ''it''. In many other languages, there would be no subject at all. In Spanish, for example, ''It is raining'' could be expressed as simply ''llueve''.) :: *an intransitive verb takes one argument, e.g. ''He1 sleeps.'' :: *a transitive verb takes two, e.g. ''He1 kicked the ball2.'' :: *a ditransitive verb takes three, e.g. ''He1 gave her2 a flower3.'' :: * There are a few verbs that take four arguments, they are tritransitive. Sometimes ''bet'' is considered to have four arguments in English, as in the examples ''I1 bet him2 five quid3 on ”The Daily Arabian”4'' and ''I1 bet you2 two dollars3 it will rain4.'' Languages that mark arguments morphologically can have true "tritransitive" verbs, such as the causative of a ditransitive verb in Abaza (which incorporates all four arguments in the sentence "He couldn't make them give it back to her" as pronominal prefixes on the verb).〔Dixon, R.M.W. (2000). "A Typology of Causatives: Form, Syntax, and Meaning". In Dixon, R.M.W. & Aikhenvald, Alexendra Y. Changing Valency: Case Studies in Transitivity. Cambridge University Press. p 57〕 The term valence also refers to the syntactic category of these elements. Verbs show considerable variety in this respect. In the examples above, the arguments are noun phrases (NPs). But arguments can in many cases be other categories, e.g. ::Winning the prize made our training worthwhile. - Subject is a non-finite verb phrase ::That he came late did not surprise us. - Subject is a clause ::Sam persuaded us to contribute to the cause. - Object is a non-finite verb phrase ::The president mentioned that she would veto this bill. - Object is a clause Many of these patterns can appear in a form rather different from the ones just shown above. For example, they can also be expressed using the passive voice: ::Our training was made worthwhile (by winning the prize). ::We were not surprised (by the fact that he came late). ::We were persuaded to contribute (by Sam). ::That she would veto this bill was mentioned (by the president). The above examples show some of the most common valence patterns in English, but do not begin to exhaust them. Other linguists have examined the patterns of more than three thousand verbs and place them in one or more of several dozen groups.〔Concerning the valency patterns, see Levin (1993).〕 The verb requires all of its arguments in a well-formed sentence, although they can sometimes undergo valency reduction or expansion. For instance, ''to eat'' is naturally divalent, as in ''he eats an apple'', but may be reduced to monovalency in ''he eats''. This is called ''valency reduction''. In the southeastern United States, an emphatic trivalent form of ''eat'' is in use, as in ''I'll eat myself some supper''. Verbs that are usually monovalent, like ''sleep'', cannot take a direct object. However, there are cases where the valency of such verbs can be expanded, for instance in ''He sleeps the sleep of death.'' This is called ''valency expansion''. Verb valence can also be described in terms of syntactic versus semantic criteria. The syntactic valency of a verb refers to the number of dependent arguments that the verb can have, while semantic valence describes the thematic relations associated with a verb. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Valency (linguistics)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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