Lönngren, Lennart: Valency Structures in Russian

Valency is traditionally thought of as a property of verbs. The present work is an attempt to explore valency as a property of all kinds of linguistic signs - words, morphemes, and signs with non-phonemic expression. An important distinction is made between semantic and syntactic signs, and amongst semantic signs between signs with and without valency. The basic unit is the "atom", i.e. a predicate together with its actants. The structure of an atom is represented by means of eleven "valency categories". These categories reflect cases and certain related properties. More than 800 valency structures (different combinations of categories) have been identified. A large material illustrating these structures makes up the major part of this book.Lennart Lönngren (born 1942) is professor of Russian linguistics at the University of Tromsø. Tromsø Studies in Linguistics 20.