Valence
Let’s now look in more detail at what happens inside phrase-level grammatical constructions. Grammatical constructions are composite structures consisting of component structures between which valence relations hold. The term ‘valence’ (or ‘valency’) usually refers to the number of participants a verb requires in order to complete its meaning. For example, a verb like die only involves a single participant, (for example, He died) whereas a verb like love involves two (for example, Lily loves George). More generally the term ‘valence’ can also be used to encompass all instances of what is traditionally described as the head-dependent relation, and this is the sense in which Langacker uses the term. These ideas are illustrated by Figure 17.1 which shows the structure of the PP under the bed. This diagram shows that the composite structure (PP) under the bed is comprised of the component structures under, the and bed, which are related by valence or the head-dependent relation (we explain the latter point in more detail below).
It is useful to revisit the traditional terms ‘head’ and ‘dependent’ before looking at how Langacker accounts for these phenomena in Cognitive Grammar. As we saw in Chapter 14, the ‘head’ of a phrase is a word-level constituent (a single word) that determines the categorical status of the phrase (for example, a noun heads a noun phrase). In addition, the head determines the core meaning of the phrase, and selects its dependents (the elements it co-occurs with inside the phrase). Consider the following example:
This is a noun phrase that contains three nouns: girl, the compound noun bus stop, and scarf. However, only one of these heads the phrase. The head of the phrase can be uncovered by our intuitions about what this phrase describes. It describes a kind of girl, not a kind of scarf or a kind of bus stop. These nouns are parts of the dependents of the head. In addition, the head of a noun phrase is revealed by subject-verb agreement:
Observe that it is the singular noun girl rather than the plural noun scarves that agrees with the verb, which is in the singular third person form is rather than the plural are. It follows that we can reduce the noun phrase to its head (plus deter miner in the case of a single count noun) and preserve its basic import: a girl.
In traditional terms, dependents divide into two main categories: complements and modifiers. Complements are phrase-level units that ‘complete’ the head both in semantic and structural terms. For example, a preposition is often incomplete without the noun phrase that follows it, in which case the noun phrase is the complement of the preposition. Modifiers, on the other hand, are ‘optional’ phrase-level units that provide additional information of a more incidental kind. In example (1), at the bus stop and knitting scarves modify the noun girl. For any theory of grammar, then, it is necessary to model these phrase-internal relationships. It is worth observing that determiners and quantifiers can also be classified as a third kind of dependent within the noun phrase which generative linguists describe as a specifier, a dependent that specifies the applicability of the head (for example, to one specific referent or to a whole class of referents). Recall that we addressed the Cognitive Grammar account of determiners and quanitifiers in the previous chapter, where we saw that these are analysed in terms of grounding predicationsrather than dependents. For this reason, we will have little to say about the role of determiners and quanti fiers within noun phrases in this chapter beyond their role in agreement (section 17.2.6).
In Langacker’s model, there are four main factors that determine valence: (1) correspondence; (2) profile determinacy; (3) conceptual autonomy versus conceptual dependence; and (4) constituency. We address each of these below.
