Valency, Rection, Dependency

Abstract

The French syntactician Lucien Tesnière noticed a syntactic mechanism in the language, namely, the valency mechanism, and he connected it with personal forms of the verb. At the same time he suggested abolishing in syntactic analyses the dichotomy of the subject phrase and verb phrase, putting the subjects and objects of sentences on one plane, directly subordinated to the verb in the personal form even though these parts of the sentence originally had a syntactic heterogeneous character. In this way in a (seemingly) homogeneous syntactic mechanism called valency he united two (otherwise) qualitatively different syntactic relationships: those of agreement (the question of the subject) and of government (the question of the object).

The article suggests a c o n s i s t e n t treatment of valency as a significantly new, specific, indeed notionally different – both from the relationship of agreement and of government – syntactic mechanism, despite the fact that sometimes it may partly or entirely overlap these relationships. The direction of structural analysis fixed by this mechanism should always be reckoned with and taken into consideration in the diagram, even if the direction pointed to the side that is opposite to, for example, the direction of rection.

Originally the consistently homogeneous rule concerning the direction of the syntactic analysis had been observed until the phenomenon of valency was also noticed in the sphere of the adjective and then the noun. At this point of applying the valency theory to the practice of syntactic analysis hesitation was shown and a solution was accepted that was not uniform or consistent in relation to the original – connected with a verb in the personal form – way valency was comprehended, using commonly, without a word of explanation or justification, such stemmas as (3) and not (2), as (3) and not (6), as (8) and not (7). This was done probably because consistent keeping to the understanding of the notion of valency connected with the verb and observing the direction of analysis fixed by this notion, also in the sphere of the adjective and noun, that is suggested in the present article, was too strongly opposed to the current language intuition of the character and direction of structural valency analysis of the sentence. Hence it is accepted that the proper syntactic hierarchy is like (4a) and (4b) and not like (4c), which probably would be more accurate because of the syntactic dependency perceived as valency one.

It seems that the suggested conception of the direction of dependency-valency analysis that is hard to accept, may be made more probable by introducing into the analysis the notional pair that has not yet been used in the valency theory: strong valency and weak valency. The former one is attributed to adjectives and relational nouns as to incomplete and semantically dependent formations, which is the source of a clearly syntactic phenomenon that exactly constitutes the mechanism of syntactic valency; weak valency should be then attributed to all other concrete common nouns as semantically and syntactically self-sufficient, and only admitting some qualifications entirely passively – rather for greater semantic detail than for structural, that is syntactic, completeness. Only those patterns should be obligatory that use exclusively valency understood in a homogeneous syntactic way marked from the top downward when it is stronger valency and upward when it is weaker valency. Considering that dependency grammar is in fact interdependency grammar the dependency direction could be marked in the stemma with a double line: an unbroken one starting from the more strongly connoting segment and directed to the more weakly connoting one (e.g. from the always qualifying functionally adjectival formation, i.e. from any qualifier, to the functionally substantival formation, always qualified), and a dotted line starting from the more weakly connoting element, directed towards the more strongly connoting element (briefly speaking, from the noun to the adjective).