Verb Valency Patterns in Academic Register: Syntactic Approach

Jolita Horbačauskienė,Saulė Petronienė

doi:10.5755/j01.sal.0.22.4297

Abstract

The article analyses the main characteristics of verb valency patterns and behaviour of verbs in syntactic structures in clauses or sentences. Herbst claims that valency, as well as collocations, can be considered as an area for errors for foreign language learners as they involve idiosyncratic knowledge that has to be learned (2010, p. 225). That is why the studies of the verb valency patterns from the syntactic point of view have an obvious applicability in foreign language studies as it allows an observation of the most common patterns of syntactic verb relations. The paper focuses on verb valency patterns in syntactic structures and aims to analyse these patterns in the academic register. Five types of verb valency patterns (monotransitive, copular, intransitive, complex transitive and ditransitive) employed in the research have been identified according to the number of complements that a predicative verb can take as well as to the type of the compliments. The paper emphasises the awareness of possible types of verb complementation which is significant and useful in the studies of languages since it enables a learner to produce a well articulated speech with grammatical clauses fully conveying the intended meaning. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.22.4297

Highlights

The concept of verb valency corresponds to the characteristics and behaviour of verbs in syntactic structures
That is why the studies of the verb valency patterns from the syntactic point of view have an obvious applicability in foreign language studies as it allows an observation of the most common patterns of syntactic verb relations
The paper emphasises the awareness of possible types of verb complementation which is significant and useful in the studies of languages since it enables a learner to produce a well articulated speech with grammatical clauses fully conveying the intended meaning

Summary

Introduction

The concept of verb valency corresponds to the characteristics and behaviour of verbs in syntactic structures. Herbst highlights the role of idiomatic and idiosyncratic aspects of a language by interdisciplinary comparison, with different branches of linguistic research such as corpus linguistics, valency theory, foreign language learning and teaching. He claims that valency description involves various levels of abstraction, whereas generalisations can be made to a certain extent; the ideosyncratic nature of valency should not be underestimated (Herbst, 2009). Noel states that valency patterns are a part of grammar but to the extent that “they assist in organizing the building blocks of a language into meaningful strings, but it does not follow that the content they might convey is of a grammatical nature” (2007, p. 75)

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