I'd like to post some thoughts that may either be a waste of people's
time or a great help to some.

I'm not sure what "valence grammar" is.  If anyone else is not sure,
then maybe the following speculations will be helpful.  If I am way
off base, then perhaps I will provoke some words of clarification.

The post from Rebecca Wheeler is very interesting  -- I gather from
what she says that "valence" is a potentially very sophisticated
system of classifying verbs according to the syntactical constraints
that they carry.

Rebecca leaves us hanging over the question about "transitive" and
"intransitive."  To such jaded grammarian minds as ours must be, this
is truly painful suspense!

When she comes back in one week, I hope she answers us this question:

Is the concept of "valence" simply a more developed, sophisticated
application of  the concept of "transitive or intransitive;"  or is
"valence" a radically different concept of verb syntax?

This is the question that Burkhard Leuschner is asking.  The answer
is coming in the next episode:

>>>BTW, while Rebecca is concerned about the terms 'subject'..., I am
>>>concerned about 'transitive' and 'intransitive' - the valence model
>>>does away with these terms. Instead of having two main groups of
>>>verbs (object or no object), in the valence model we have seven,
>>>which are of equal importance - which is much nearer to the
>>>'truth'.
>
> I've got to run to catch a plane, so I won't be able to respond to
> this last point now, or to respond to any other threads in this
> conversation.
>
> more in a week,
> :)
> rebecca

My suspicion is that "valence" can be assimmilated into traditional
grammar.  The basic concept is the same as "transitive or
intransitive."  Valence would therefore be a valid and sophisticated
extension of a traditional concept, which would be a conclusion
satisfying to me personally.

However, no posting on "valence" has really defined the term for us.
We never got a simple definition "functional grammar" either.
Perhaps we should be expected to do more research, and to read some
of the citations on these topics.  But a simple definition seems fair
enough to ask on a grammarians' listserve.

I looked up "valence" in the dictionary:  it is a word from chemistry
that means "the unique quality of an atom that determines how many
other atoms that it can combine with."

Applied to syntax, the valence of a verb would be the unique quality
of a verb that decides whether or not it requires an object, i.e.,
"transitive or intransitive."

Now, where this gets really interesting, and I learned from Rebecca's
posting, is that here the purely lexical level (i.e., the qualities
of the verb as a word) has a big effect on the purely syntactical level
(i.e., the structure of the clause, especially the predicate).

This is a really deep seated grammatical question:

Why should the qualities of the _verb choice_ determine
the structure of the _predicate_ as a whole?

Why should _word_ qualities have an effect on _syntax_?

This to me is a very interesting idea that possibly collapses the
separation between the lexcial level and the syntactical level.

Rebecca shows us that you can line up additional valence qualities:

> To give you an example of some of where I'm coming from on this, I found
> there that verbs of searching and analyzing, perhaps surprisingly, shared a
> pretty great commonality of meaning -- what put me on to it was their
> similarity of syntactic structure.
>
> NP1 V NP2 for NP3  -- Jami searched the woods for deer.
>
> NP1 V NP2 for NP3  -- Jami analyzed the document for flaws.
>
>         (notice that in both cases -- in some sense, the thing to which
>         NP2 refers contains the thing to which NP3 refers --
>         woods may contain deer; document may contain flaws)
>
> Without going into the details of the semantics, the perception is that the
> similarity of the "argument structure" here, points to a similarity of
> meaning -- in each case, someone is attempting to ascertain a particular
> relationship between the thing denoted by NP2 and NP3.
>
> Have you all seen BETH LEVIN'S book, "English Verb Classes and
> Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation?" -- there, she does this huge
> classification of seemingly thousands of English verbs by the types of such
> patterns they fall in.
>
> ALL OF WHICH is to say, is this is the context I was referring to when I
> mentioned 'valence' work.
>

The verbs "search" and "analyze" require a specific predicate
structure.  This is a very interesting line of discovery.

I think that this is what "valence" means.  Now, here's the real drama:  is
"valence" different from, or an extention of, the "transitive -  intransitive"
concept?  Find out next week!

R. E.