Investigating valency

Author : Marian Klamer

Publication date : 2000

Bibliographical references :

Klamer, Marian. 2000. Valency Questionaire. for the 2000 East Nusantara Linguistics Workshop, workshop on valency.

Goals

This checklist-like questionnaire aims to help the linguist describing and analysing the different valency phenonemon that can exist within a language. 
"The study of verbal valency also helps us to discover more about the structure of the lexicon. For example: Which semantic notions are expressed by root words, and how do these differ (if at all) from the notions expressed in morphologically derived forms? Can we make crosslinguistic generalisations here, or does every language exhibit its own ideosyncratic lexical patterns?" (Klamer, 2000: 1)

Protocol summary

The questionnaire is divided in 4 sections :

- Valency and morpho-syntax: the expression of verbal arguments
- Overview of verbal classes according to valency
- Valency and derivational morphology: Valency-increasing devices. It includes causative and applicative structures, possessor raising or external possession and the mutual interaction of valency increasing derivations
- Valency and derivational morphology: valency decreasing processes. It gathers passive, de-transitive, reflexive and reciprocal structures, as well as the object incorporation phenomena and other detransitivising processes.

Development context

It was developed by Marian Klamer for the 2000 East Nusantara Linguistics Workshop. workshop on valency.

For other questionnaires developed for the same workshop, see :

• Bowden, John. 2000. "Language contact in East Nusantara". for the 2000 East Nusantara Linguistics Workshop, workshop on language contact.
• Engelenhoven, Aone van. 2000. "Deixis and Location". for the 2000 East Nusantara Linguistics Workshop, workshop on deixis
• Florey, Margaret. 2000. "Oral Traditions Questionnaire". for the 2000 East Nusantara Linguistics Workshop, workshop on oral traditions.