User:Lesley15/sandbox

The article on valency is intended to asses and comprehend the linguistic topic on Valency. It is an important aspect of linguistics that demonstrates the verb structures in a phrase, indicating the number of arguments and the type of arguments a verb can obtain in a phrase. Valency is syntactically important as it gives reference and structures verb phrases. It is a descent article on valency and one can obtain a good amount of knowledge from it. The topic is broken down into categories which aids in grasping the material better. Furthermore, definitions of unknown words that are essential to understand the concept of valency are given with small examples, which also help to get a clearer view. Important points on the topic were made including a short history excerpt on the naming of the subject valency and how the name was derived for it. The topic was clearly addressed throughout the article consistently without subject change or non-related information. References used in the article seem to come from reliable sources. The author utilized sources that come from linguistic professionals. For example some of the works cited included come from specialists such as Chomsky, Teniere and Levin. All of them have extensive experience in the linguistics field; therefore, are reliable to use in this article. In my opinion, the viewpoints represented in the article don’t seem to be over represented nor underrepresented. There might be small glitches I might not be catching up to due to my poor or incomplete knowledge on a broad topic like this one, on valency. There doesn’t seem to be any plagiarism or close paraphrasing in the article.  Some of the comments made on the talk page caught my attention. One of the commentator stated that a sentence like “He gave her the ball with his hand” should be considered to be a “tetrawhatsumicallit”, meaning a tetra transitive. In my opinion I don’t agree that the phrase would be considered a tetra transitive, rather a ditransitive, because it is only a 3 part argument. The Phrase ‘with his hand’ is just an extra and can be omitted from the phrase and the phrase will still be sound. Another comment that caught my attention was when someone mentioned that the statement from the author that impersonal verbs takes no arguments.(e.g. It rains) and even though ‘It’ is the main subject of the verb in English, it is a useless subject,  that is a syntactic placeholder, there is no concrete referent and no other subject can replace it. In other languages, there would be no subject at all.For example, he states that in Spanish, it is raining could be expressed as simply llueve. The commentator to that statement stated that it is not the case that that statement is true. That there are a couple of Latin examples that could maybe counter that definition. Though I agree with the author’s statement, I kind of have a feeling that maybe the commentator can also be right. I am no specialist nor do I have extensive knowledge on that statement, but there could maybe be something missing to that statement. Maybe the author could give a couple more examples on how that statement fits as stated.

Questions

Q 1: Is there any special cases in which ditransitive and tetra transitive verbs can defy the set of rules applied to them?

Q2: Why would it be the case that impersonal verbs take no arguments? Would there be any exceptions that can possibly apply to that concept?

Q3: Why is it that every phrase has different number of verb structures? Why can’t they all have one set number of verb structures?