In the grammatical theory of valency, the verbs organize sentences by binding the specific elements.
For example, the usage of causative morphology with a ditransitive verb in Abaza produces tritranstivity (such as the translation of the sentence "He couldn't make them give it back to her", which incorporates all four arguments as pronominal prefixes on the verb).
[7] The verb requires all of its arguments in a well-formed sentence, although they can sometimes undergo valency reduction or expansion.
Verb valence can also be described in terms of syntactic versus semantic criteria.
Tesnière 1959[8] expresses the idea of valence as follows (translation from French): One can therefore compare the verb to a sort of atom with bonds, susceptible to exercising attraction on a greater or lesser number of actants.
An important aspect of Tesnière's understanding of valency was that the subject is an actant (=argument, complement) of the verb in the same manner that the object is.
:[12]: 72 There are some problems, however, with the terms passive and antipassive because they have been used to describe a wide range of behaviors across the world's languages.
[12]: 73 Valence plays an important role in a number of the syntactic frameworks that have been developed in the last few decades.
Work in government and binding (GB)[17] takes the approach of generating all such structures with a single schema, called the X-bar schema:[18] X and Y can stand for a number of different lexical categories, and each instance of the symbol ′ stands for a bar.
Two bars, used here for the complements, is thought by some linguists to be a maximal projection of a lexical category.
The network and one of the schemata aims to subsume the large number of specific rules defining the valence of particular lexical items.
Notice that the rule (VP → H NP [love]) and the schema (X′ → X, Y″...) deal only with non-subject complements.
This is because all of the above syntactic frameworks use a totally separate rule (or schema) to introduce the subject.
This is a major difference between them and Tesnière's original understanding of valency, which included the subject, as mentioned above.
One of the most widely known versions of construction grammar (CxG)[20] also treats the subject like other complements, but this may be because the emphasis is more on semantic roles and compatibility with work in cognitive science than on syntax.