Tetravalent Verbs

[Lukas Kelly]

Hey, can anyone list what verbs are tetravalent? I'm looking for something related to a conlang I'm doing, but it seems more fitting to put this in L&L because of the nature of the question. Right now, I have bet and sell, but I'm having trouble finding more.

[Bob Johnson]

I sell seashells.
I sold the house.
I bet.
I bet that you won't accept that, though.
I bet on Secretariat.

Are you looking for verbs in a language other than English? Valency refers to required arguments -- otherwise "go" could be, let's see -- I went looking for a job from Chicago to Bangor by car with my friend while listening to rock music...

[TomHChappell]

Hey, can anyone list what verbs are tetravalent? I'm looking for something related to a conlang I'm doing, but it seems more fitting to put this in L&L because of the nature of the question. Right now, I have bet and sell, but I'm having trouble finding more.

Search for "tetravalent" here on this ZBBoard.

See this thread: http://zbb.spinnwebe.com/viewtopic.php? ... etravalent.

There's no need to make a new thread on "tetravalent".

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Search for "tritransitive".

See this article: http://wwwstaff.eva.mpg.de/~cschmidt/SW ... ttilae.pdf
or here http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article- ... types.html.
Or see it here: http://www.reference-global.com/doi/abs ... G.2007.015.
Or here: http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=18782222.

http://www.learnarabiconline.com/verbal-sentences.shtml has a tritransitive example in Arabic.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1263529 discusses two types of tritransitive verbs in Sierra Popoluca.

I don't know what UNL is, but they mention tritransitivity in http://www.unlweb.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=382.

I hope some of that helps.

[Xephyr]

Also: goshnarbit I thought we as a society had agreed to put the Latinate prefixes before -valent and the Graecian prefixes before -transitive. The word ought to be "quadrivalent".

[TomHChappell]

Also: goshnarbit I thought we as a society had agreed to put the Latinate prefixes before -valent and the Graecian prefixes before -transitive. The word ought to be "quadrivalent".

Your post is the only one on the board with "quadrivalent" in it.

But several off-ZBB hits come up.
For instance
http://meaningtext.net/mtt2007/proceedi ... sFinal.pdf
(also http://www.dinaelkassas.com/fichiers/EL ... ersion.pdf)

http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/valency/pd ... khvakh.pdf
http://archives.conlang.info/fo/pirgo/bifhuengal.html
http://screcherche.univ-lyon3.fr/lexis/ ... article111
http://www.springerlink.com/content/a627p4178n435561/
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/pr ... _17_1_1260

[Terra]

Hey, can anyone list what verbs are tetravalent? I'm looking for something related to a conlang I'm doing, but it seems more fitting to put this in L&L because of the nature of the question. Right now, I have bet and sell, but I'm having trouble finding more.

I don't think English has any. I don't English has any tritransitive verbs either. There's plenty of bitransitive (and monotransitive, of course) verbs though. I don't you know what you're asking the right thing if "to bet" and "to sell" fulfill these requirements of yours.

[Radius Solis]

Hey, can anyone list what verbs are tetravalent? I'm looking for something related to a conlang I'm doing, but it seems more fitting to put this in L&L because of the nature of the question. Right now, I have bet and sell, but I'm having trouble finding more.

I don't think English has any. I don't English has any tritransitive verbs either.

"Transitive" starts at valence=2, so monotransitive = bivalent, ditransitive = trivalent, and tritransitive = tetravalent.

As for English having any tetravalent verbs, I₁ bet you₂ a dollar₃ it does₄. So long as we are talking about "takes four arguments", not "takes four arguments that are all nouns."

Also: goshnarbit I thought we as a society had agreed to put the Latinate prefixes before -valent and the Graecian prefixes before -transitive. The word ought to be "quadrivalent".

OCTOPODES

[Terra]

"Transitive" starts at valence=2, so monotransitive = bivalent, ditransitive = trivalent, and tritransitive = tetravalent.

As for English having any tetravalent verbs, I1 bet you2 a dollar3 it does4. So long as we are talking about "takes four arguments", not "takes four arguments that are all nouns."

Disregard my post. I'm an idiot.

[Bob Johnson]

As for English having any tetravalent verbs, I₁ bet you₂ a dollar₃ it does₄. So long as we are talking about "takes four arguments", not "takes four arguments that are all nouns."

I bet it doesn't. One dollar please.

There's a difference between "can take 4 arguments" and "requires 4 arguments." You can add as many optional arguments as you like with prepositional phrases such as "[that] it does". 1(I) went 2(in my car) 3(from my house) 4(to the store) 5(with the baby) 6(to buy milk) 7(for the other baby) etc etc etc. With "bet", you can delete any subset of its arguments except the ones that leave you with "I bet you," which would be a dative in any other verb, or "I bet," which changes the meaning into more of a set-phrase/interjection than a normal verb usage.

"Bet" here is at least better than "sell" in that you can't un-cleft the "dative" (which is what I'm going to call that transformation since apparently nobody has a name for it):
I sold him the car.
I sold the car to him.
I sold the car.
I bet him one dollar.
*I bet one dollar to him.
I bet one dollar.

[Ulrike Meinhof]

There's a difference between "can take 4 arguments" and "requires 4 arguments." You can add as many optional arguments as you like with prepositional phrases such as "[that] it does". 1(I) went 2(in my car) 3(from my house) 4(to the store) 5(with the baby) 6(to buy milk) 7(for the other baby) etc etc etc.

There's also a difference between arguments and adjuncts. I'm not sure that everyone agrees on the terminology, but the way I've learnt it, only the subject in your example is an argument of the verb, and the rest are adjuncts. The path expressed by from my house is not an intrinsic part of the concept of walking, while there being someone who walks is.

On the other hand, I, you, a dollar and that it does are all arguments of bet because they are inherent parts of the act of betting. That makes bet a semantically tetravalent verb. Some of the arguments are omissible, so it can alternate between being either mono-, bi-, tri- or tetravalent syntactically.

Is what I've read in Van Valin's An Introduction to Syntax.

[Bob Johnson]

On the other hand, I, you, a dollar and that it does are all arguments of bet because they are inherent parts of the act of betting. That makes bet a semantically tetravalent verb. Some of the arguments are omissible, so it can alternate between being either mono-, bi-, tri- or tetravalent syntactically.

So we can have a sentence that's valid syntactically but which omits intrinsic semantic arguments... Yes. Good point! Passive verbs, for instance, or "walking happened." The walking is zero-valency!

[Astraios]

"walking happened." The walking is zero-valency!

Is this not a nominal argument plus a monovalent verb?

[Bob Johnson]

Semantically, of course. Read the post I was replying to.

Who walked? Where did they go? With whom? It's a mystery!

[Astraios]

Ohh, now I get it. [/fail]

[Ulrike Meinhof]

On the other hand, I, you, a dollar and that it does are all arguments of bet because they are inherent parts of the act of betting. That makes bet a semantically tetravalent verb. Some of the arguments are omissible, so it can alternate between being either mono-, bi-, tri- or tetravalent syntactically.

So we can have a sentence that's valid syntactically but which omits intrinsic semantic arguments... Yes. Good point! Passive verbs, for instance, or "walking happened." The walking is zero-valency!

Yes, or "it rains", which is semantically zero-valent.

[Radius Solis]

There's a difference between "can take 4 arguments" and "requires 4 arguments." You can add as many optional arguments as you like with prepositional phrases such as "[that] it does". 1(I) went 2(in my car) 3(from my house) 4(to the store) 5(with the baby) 6(to buy milk) 7(for the other baby) etc etc etc.

There's also a difference between arguments and adjuncts. I'm not sure that everyone agrees on the terminology, but the way I've learnt it, only the subject in your example is an argument of the verb, and the rest are adjuncts. The path expressed by from my house is not an intrinsic part of the concept of walking, while there being someone who walks is.

Yeah. And actually that would have been clearer from my post if I hadn't changed some word choices in a last-minute edit! Everywhere I said "argument", I had originally typed "complement", and only changed it so that I could use the subscript numbers on each argument to make clearer the valence of 4. Ah well.


For what it's worth, I really dislike the "intrinsic part of betting" vs. "extra information" explanation for the complement-adjunct distinction, for several related reasons. Deciding what is and isn't an intrinsic participant in a concept is often rather arbitrary - for example instruments are often centrally involved in the core concept expressed in some verbs. You can't nail two boards together without nailing them with something (generally a hammer). But we would express the hammer with an adjunct. Places and times are intrinsically involved in most things we say, but we put those in adjuncts too. The complement-adjunct distinction is a syntactic one, so why not express it in terms of syntax instead of in terms of semantics?

There are tests for the status of complement in English. A very important one is that complements cannot be separated from their heads by any adjuncts:

1.
a) I wrecked my car after the game on Saturday.
b) I wrecked my car on Saturday after the game.
c) *I wrecked after the game my car on Saturday.
d) *I wrecked on Saturday my car after the game.
e) *I wrecked after the game on Saturday my car.
f) *I wrecked on Saturday after the game my car.

"on Saturday" and "after the game" can freely go in either order with respect to each other - but in no case can "my car" be separated from the verb by either or both. So it's a complement and the other two are adjuncts.

This leads to our being able to test any participant in such a sentence for complement status:

2.
a) He bet me a dollar it does with a grin.
b) *He bet me a dollar with a grin it does.
c) *He bet me with a grin a dollar it does.
d) *He bet with a grin me a dollar it does.

When applying this test, watch out for a pitfall: adverbials can appear to go between complements if they are actually within one. So "I bet you dinner at the Ritz it does" does not invalidate the test, because "at the Ritz" modifies "dinner", not the verb. And it is not always as obvious as this example.

A second pitfall: "heavy NP shift". Sometimes direct objects that contain a lot of words will be shunted to the end of the sentence in a place where the test predicts they shouldn't be able to go. This doesn't happen with short complements: He saw it on Tuesday. / *He saw on Tuesday it. But with long ones it is very common: He saw on Tuesday a sprawling mansion with a four-car garage. Anywhere this might screw up your results, replace the element you're testing with a pronoun.

[Ulrike Meinhof]

Good points! I was never really satisfied by the quite arbitrary criteria for distinguishing complements and adjuncts either. I'll remember this.

[TomHChappell]

Going back to the Latin prefixes for valency and the Greek prefixes for transitivity, we would have:

Code: Select all

univalent                     intransitive
bivalent                      monotransitive
trivalent or tervalent        ditransitive
quadrivalent                  tritransitive
quintivalent                  tetratransitive
sexavalent                    pentatransitive
septavalent                   hexatransitive
octovalent                    heptatransitive
novemvalent or nonovalent     oktatransitive
decavalent                    enneatransitive
undecimvalent                 dekatransitive

But I don't think any natlang has been reported that has more than four grammatical (or syntactic) relations (or functions); subject, primary object, and two secondary objects. At least, none has been reported by any linguist who thinks grammatical relations are worth talking about.

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In languages with applicatives, one way to tell arguments (or terms or complements) from adjuncts is, that oblique arguments (arguments that don't occupy a grammatical relation) can be promoted to a grammatical relation via applicativization; adjuncts cannot.

Again, the validity of such a test varies as much (or more!) from linguist to linguist as it does from language to language.

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"walking happened." The walking is zero-valency!

Is this not a nominal argument plus a monovalent verb?

Several languages allow a speaker to "passivize" a monovalent root verb into a 0-valent form.
Some of them, like Turkish and Hindi, allow double passivization -- you can re-passivize something that's already passive. In those languages speakers can inflect a bivalent root verb into a 0-valent finite form.

[Lukas Kelly]

I know avalency occurs in the English language in sentences like "It's raining", because the "it" isn't a subject. I believe it's an expletive, but I'm not sure. And I thought the Greek ones go with valency, because that's what I've been reading.

[TomHChappell]

I know avalency occurs in the English language in sentences like "It's raining", because the "it" isn't a subject. I believe it's an expletive, but I'm not sure. And I thought the Greek ones go with valency, because that's what I've been reading.

The usual statement is; English requires dummy subjects.

I'm not sure 0-valency and avalency are synonyms.
"Avalent" could be taken to mean that a word doesn't have a valency at all.
A 0-valent word has a valency, namely 0.
If "avalent" means "doesn't have a valency", than a 0-valent word is not avalent.

[Bob Johnson]

I know avalency occurs in the English language in sentences like "It's raining", because the "it" isn't a subject. I believe it's an expletive, but I'm not sure. And I thought the Greek ones go with valency, because that's what I've been reading.

Stop! Table time! :music:

Code: Select all

Case        Nominative   Accusative   Argument(?)   ???
Grammar     Subject      Object       Argument(?)   Valency(?)
Semantics   Agent        Patient      Argument(?)   Valency(?)

(for most active transitive English verbs, at least)

In "It's raining", the nominative "it" is the subject. There's no referent for "it" -- semantically, there's no agent. Grammatically, there's one argument, and "to rain" requires it in English; you can't just say "Raining." Thus it is grammatically 1-valent. Semantically, unless somebody is standing up there with a rain machine, nobody is doing the raining, and even in that case we don't have to specify that, so it's semantically 0-valent.

Half of this thread is people getting confused about whether we're talking about grammatical or semantic arguments and valency. It would be nice to have clearer words so we don't get bogged down in philosophy.

[Radius Solis]

In retrospect I missed an important point in distinguishing "optional" arguments from "optional" adjuncts in English. It's not really a test, per se, but I think it's conceptually very important to understanding how this stuff works... at least in our language. I make no claims about others.


English verbs, as part of their individual lexical properties, each lay out a particular template of argument slots. Characteristic of argument slots is that they are often quite restricted in what types of material can fill them. Subjects and direct objects are very prototypical argument slots, but there are other possibilities, and some verbs lay out slots that do not nicely correspond with any traditional terms. Some lay out slots that cannot be filled by nominals - the "bet" example above is far from alone in this.

The subject slot is the only one shared by all English verbs and the only one that is required to fill in all clauses. Other slots can typically be filled or left empty as the speaker finds appropriate for their purposes - I don't believe we have any verbs that always require a direct object to be present in the clause, say, so long as one can be understood from context. Another key point is that you cannot fill a slot that a verb does not have.

By contrast, adjuncts are elements which do not populate verb-specified slots. Adjuncts can be freely added to any clause regardless of the verb, and in long sequences, provided they are semantically compatible.


So, looking at "I went in my car from my house to the store with the baby to buy milk for the other baby" -
The verb "go" has only two arguments slots; the first is the subject of course. A second slot exists for specifying a destination... but this slot is restricted to a very few words like "here"/"there" and "home" and "around". No prepositional phrase will do, not even one that specifies a destination. Let's stop a moment to examine that:

3.
a) I went to the store in my car.
b) I went in my car to the store.
c) I went home in my car.
d) *I went in my car home.

So we see that "to the store" and "in my car" are both adjuncts - both can be freely separated from the verb - while "home" is a complement and thus an argument. But all of the above are clearly optional. So again, being "optional" doesn't really help us very much to distinguish arguments from adjuncts. From here, it should hopefully be apparent that in the previous example the only argument is "I" and the other six elements after the verb are all adjuncts.

Returning to the original example of "bet", it should be clearer now that it does lay out a template of four slots: ___₁ bet ___₂ ___₃ ___₄ - and we can see there are clear restrictions on most. 1 and 2 take ordinary nominal arguments, but have to be animate; 3 also requires a nominal, but is otherwise unrestricted; while 4 is required to be a subclause starting with "that" (or with zero, where a "that" is dropped) to indicate the condition for the bet. You can't fill 4 with just any old prepositional phrase or conditional clause, it has to be a "that"-clause.