Verb Valency Patterns in Academic Register: Syntactic Approach

Abstract

The article analyses the main characteristics of verb valency patterns and behaviour of verbs in syntactic structures in clauses or sentences. Herbst claims that valency, as well as collocations, can be considered as an area for errors for foreign language learners as they involve idiosyncratic knowledge that has to be learned (2010, p. 225). That is why the studies of the verb valency patterns from the syntactic point of view have an obvious applicability in foreign language studies as it allows an observation of the most common patterns of syntactic verb relations. The paper focuses on verb valency patterns in syntactic structures and aims to analyse these patterns in the academic register. Five types of verb valency patterns (monotransitive, copular, intransitive, complex transitive and ditransitive) employed in the research have been identified according to the number of complements that a predicative verb can take as well as to the type of the compliments. The paper emphasises the awareness of possible types of verb complementation which is significant and useful in the studies of languages since it enables a learner to produce a well articulated speech with grammatical clauses fully conveying the intended meaning. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.22.4297