Adjectival valency as valency constructions

Abstract

The article offers new data to the debate on lexical vs. constructional approaches to valency. Research on valency has mainly been concerned with verbs, and in this article it is argued that the neglected area of adjectival valency can shed some new light on this fundamental question. Among the evidence in favour of a constructional approach are the considerable differences in the possibilities of valency realisation between adjectives in attributive and in predicative function. It is also argued that a constructional approach allows for a more principled treatment of polysemy between valency variants.

When complementation gets specific: A study of collocational preferences in verb–object combinations in Norwegian

“…First of all, they know in which syntactic patterns predicators conventionally occur. Secondly, they know that there may be clear preferences also for the exact lexical fillers of the complement slots that are available in a pattern (Herbst 2007, Haugen 2013, Goldberg 2019. This is the crucial point that a database of verb-object combinations allows us to investigate further.…”