Explanation
Valency is the property of a linguistic expression, especially a verb, to open particular complement positions and constrain their grammatical form and semantic roles. “Give” typically projects a scene involving a giver, something given, and a recipient, whereas “sleep” does not require that architecture. Borrowed from chemistry, the metaphor reveals combinatorial possibilities but must not be interpreted mechanically: complements may remain unexpressed, different senses have different valency frames, and languages realise participants in divergent ways. Valency leads from an individual word toward the sentences it can organise. It shows that lexical meaning already contains expectations about relations which syntax orders and makes explicit or implicit under particular contextual conditions.
Movement of thought
1. A verb evokes a particular kind of event or state. 2. Its meaning opens roles for necessary or expected participants. 3. Grammar assigns possible cases, prepositions, and positions to those roles. 4. Omission, sense variation, and cross-linguistic comparison test the proposed frame. 5. The individual word returns as the centre of several possible sentence architectures.
Scientific use case
Valency dictionaries and corpora can record complement patterns by verb sense, grammatical form, and frequency. Acquisition and translation studies can test how learners process divergent valency frames across languages.
Example
“Mara gives Jonas the book” realises giver, recipient, and theme. In “Mara gives the book away”, the recipient is unexpressed while the transfer relation remains available for interpretation.
Counterexample
An optional expression of time or place is not automatically valency-bound merely because it occurs in a clause. Conversely, a participant's omission does not show that it lacks a semantic place in the valency frame.
Distinction
Distinguish valency from government, semantic roles, and adjuncts. Government concerns formal dependency, roles describe modes of participation, and adjuncts expand a situation without being selected in the same way by its lexical centre.
Effect on thought and perception
Valency turns words into relational centres and shows which participants a meaning expects or permits in the architecture of possible clauses.
Resonance
A verb calls for particular participants; even when they remain silent, their places persist as tensions within the linguistic event.
Cite this entry
Reich, Michael (Hrsg./ed.): „Valency“. Atlas der Sprache, AT-091-048. ATLAS 260, data model 1.6.0. https://atlasoflanguage.com/concept/AT-091-048The address remains stable; editorial content may evolve. Editorial reading state: 2026-10-15. Include your access date for precise references.
Historical background
On pp. 122–123 Jespersen treats complete predicative combinations as complements of verbs and considers resultative patterns with ordinarily intransitive verbs. This witnesses a historical problem of complement possibilities. It does not directly attest the later valency framework or establish the chemical metaphor's transfer. German disciplinary development and English adoption of valency require their own historical sources.
How conceptual history changes the analysis
Separate a verb's possibilities from extensions supplied by a construction. Do not infer an additional participant slot from a single example alone.
References for the historical section
- Otto Jespersen, The Philosophy of Grammar, work first published 1924; inspected later printing with November 1934 afterword, exact printing year unresolved · Chapter IX, Nexus-Object; Chapter XII, object and voice
Selected historical witness, not a complete genealogy or a first English attestation. Atlas comparisons and applications are original editorial interpretations. OCR of a later printing containing a 1934 afterword. The catalogue’s 1924 date identifies the work’s first publication, not the inspected copy. Historical judgments about languages and social groups require critical distance.