Valence, Transitivity, Voice

Valence Valence is the number of arguments controlled by a verbal predicate. Valency deals with the question of how many participants a certain verb logically presupposes in order for the event denoted by the verb to be realizable. Avalent It rains/snows Monovalent I sleep/die/wither/walk Divalent I hit/love/meet/watch/see him Trivalent I give/hand/offer/send him a book Tetravalent I bet you 5 $ on it

Transitivity It is a complex, clause-level phenomenon, fundamental to the structure of major clause types. It is sometimes also called Syntactic Transitivity. Whereas valency includes all the arguments, including the subject of the verb, transitivity counts only the object arguments of the verbal predicate. Impersonal verb It rains/snows Intransitive verb He sleeps Transitive verb He kicked the ball Ditransitive verb He gave her a flower Tritransitive verb I bet you two dollars on his losing

Voice The voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments. Put simply, it indicates when a grammatical Subject performs the action or is the receiver of the action. The active voice is the most commonly used in many languages and represents the “normal” case in which the Subject of the verb is the agent. The passive voice is employed in a clause whose Subject expresses theme or patient of the verb.

Some languages have a middle voice. It is a set of inflections or constructions, which are to some extent different from both the active and passive voices. The subject often cannot be characterized as either agent or patient but may have elements of both: ‘The casserole cooked in the oven’ In the above example, the verb ‘cooked’ is syntactically active but semantically passive.