A Study Of Valency Of English Adjectives

Valency Grammar or Dependency Grammar,which came into being in the fifties of this century,has fully developed since then.In spite of its short history,the current application of this theory manifests its brilliant prospects in the future.The French linguist Lucien Tesniere(1893-1954)is generally rated as the founder of the theory.The essentials of the theory are fully expounded in Tesniere’s book "Elements de Syntaxe-Structurale".His book was published in 1959,but the draft was completed in 1939.Valency Grammar achieved rapid advance in Europe,esp.in Germany in the early sixties.Its spread and application to language study in China bagan in 1978 when an article entitled "’De-zi’Structure and SVC Pattern" by Zu De-xi came to the publication.The concept of "Valence" is derived from chemistry.Valency Grammar mainly studies the relationship between governing words(governors)and dependent words(dependents).Governors are treated as the "core of sentences".The rest of the syntactic elements more or less depend upon governors.This view quite differs from Traditional Grammar,in which the relation between subjects and predicates is greatly amphasized.On account of this point,the method with which Valency Grammar analyses syntactic structure is quite different from that adopted in Traditional Grammar.Generally speaking,applying the theory of Valency Grammar to studying the English language is not common at present.In China,this kind of applied research is even rarer.This thesis aims to study the valence of English adjectives.I hope that the thesis may invoke the attention and interest of a large variety of scholars so that more and more people might focus their attention and energy on the study of Valency Grammar.The thesis consists of six chapters.In the end notes and bibliography are also supplied.Chaper One briefly introduces the occurrence and development of Valency Grammar.It is still under dispute who first introduced the concept of"Valence".But no doubt Lucien Tesniere has made great contributions to the development of Valency Grammar.At first linguists mainly studied syntactic and semantic valency.Later they extended their scope of academic research to logical valency.And the valency-carrier extends from verbs to adjectives and nouns.Later grammarians put forward the concept of pragmatic valence from the viewpoint of communication.Hence dynamic study of the theory made its appearance which goes along with static research.The Chapter remarks that quite a few scholars have been engaged in applying the theory to studying the Chinese language.A few scholars are working with great dedication to studying German valence.Chapter Two discusses the complements of English adjectives.The concept of complements(comps)possesses different connotations in the viewpoint of other grammatical theory.However,in Valency Grammar,comps only refer to those elements governed by the valency-carriers.Comps include syntactic subjects,objects and adverbials,etc.They may be nouns or nominal clauses like that-,if-and wh-clauses,prepositional phrases and non-finite verbal clauses like infinitival clauses and verbs’-ing form clauses,etc.This chapter also explores the issue of how to classify camps and peripheral elements,obligatory coops and optional comps.At last I point out that some measure nominal expressions ought to be subsumed under the comps of some adjectives.So far this point has not been noticed by certain linguists.Chapter Three studies the valence of adjectives at length.We have zero-valent adjectives,monovalent adjectives,divalent adjectives and trivalent adjectives.Each kind has some valency patterns.Among them divalent adjectives have much more and complex valency pat terns,which may explain why adjectives of this kind characteristically produce abundant and complicated English sentence patterns.Chapter Four holds that semantic selection may confine the formation of adjectives’ valencies.This shows that the governing capacity of core words are anything but omnipotent.To know this feature is essential to language learners and lexicographers.So learners should familiarize themselves with semantic features of the valencies of adjectives in order not to make grammatically unacceptable sentences.It is necessary for lexicographers to take this charateristic into account so as to improve the readability of dictionaries.In this section,I also express the hope that dictionaries of English Valency can appear soon.In addition,how to describe the valency of adjectives is also discussed.Chapter Five specifies the value of Valency Grammar.Its theoretical value consists in having enriched the content of the three major notional word classes-vrbs,nouns and adjectives.No doubt this in some measure remedies the deficiency existing in Traditional Grammar for teaching.The salient facet lies in the fact that the theory may well construe certain grammatical phenomena such as ellipsis.In addition,the publication of German Valency dictionaries in the seventies suggests that the theory of Valency Grammar can function as instruction towards lexicography.In China,the theory has already been used as guide lines for compiling German textbooks for Chinese undergraduates.All this displays the great practical value of this theory.The last chapter reiterates the main points of the thesis.Meanwhile I also refer to my own view in relation to some controversial questions and my contribution to the improvement of the theory of Valency Grammar.