ABSTRACT
The concept of ‘valency’ originates in chemical sciences. It refers to the property of atoms of one element to combine with atoms of other elements. The term is borrowed into linguistics to denote a dependency relation between a verb and a given number of nouns. A verb which obligatorily takes one noun is called a mono-valent verb, e.g., zǒu (走, go) as in rén zǒu (人走, ‘a person goes’) and fēi (飞, fly) as in niǎo fēi (鸟飞, ‘a bird flies’). Similarly, a di-valent verb has a valency of two, i.e., it obligatorily takes two nouns (Zhu, 1985a: 125-150), e.g., mǎi (买, buy) as in tā mǎi cài (他买菜, ‘he buys the food’) and zhuó (啄, peck) as in jī zhuó mǐ (鸡啄米, ‘a chick pecks the rice’). This chapter is intended to apply the concept of verbal valency to examine nouns.1
