The functional approach to researching verb valency (a case study of English denominal verbs)

The paper is devoted to the examination of verb valency in the context of functional grammar. Verb valency manifests itself both at the semantic and syntactic levels; therefore, it can be considered a language phenomenon realised by multi-structural means. This is why it should be studied in a complex way which can be done using the functional approach. The author sees valency as a functional category comprising different linguistic means of expressing participants of a situation determined by a verb. The semantic centre of the category is a verbal predicate. A verb is a nucleus of the complex with actants grouped around it. Actants are elements of the category which are semantically and syntactically connected with the verb. They participate in the description of a situation determined by the verb. The novelty of the study is the complex examination of verb valency at semantic and syntactic levels. The analysis of valency was conducted using the example of three English denominal verbs to dog, to hare, to parrot. In order to find semantic actants, definitions of the verbs taken from on-line dictionaries (Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary) were studied. The data for the analysis of syntactic valency were taken from three corpora of the English language: the British National Corpus, the Leipzig University Corpus, British English 2006. The total number of instances analysed was 330. The final stage of the study involved the construction of the verb valency structure models based on the elicited actants. In the centre of the models there are actants found both at the semantic and syntactic levels; the act-ants existing at one level only are in the periphery. Apart from creating the models, the analysis allowed the author to find out a number of disparities between semantic and syntactic actants (for example, in most cases the number of syntactic actants exceeds the number of semantic ones). This proves the necessity of studying verb valency at different levels. The research findings are important for understanding the correlation between potentional and resultative aspects of verb functioning. Syntactic actants found as a result of the corpus analysis can later be used for the expansion of the dictionary definitions of the examined verbs.

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