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Structure of word groups

Valency as the basic principle of word-grouping

THE PROBLEMS OF COLLOCABILITY AND PHRASEOLOGY

Lexicology deals not only with words, but with word-groups as well. A word group may be defined as the largest two facet lexical unit comprising more than one word. The two main linguistic factors that unite words in groups are: the lexical and grammatical valency of the words.

Lexical valency (or collocability) is the aptness of a word to appear in various combinations. The noun question, e.g., is combined with such adjectives as vital, urgent, disputable, delicate. This noun is often used in such word combinations as to raise a question, a question of a day, a question of great importance.

There is a certain norm of lexical valency for each word in a language. Words habitually collocated in speech tend to constitute a cliche. To them belong such word-groups as keen sight, put forward a question, to gain victory.

The word's collocability is also defined by grammatical valency which is the aptness of a word to appear in specific grammatical (or rather syntactic) structure. The range of grammatical valency is delimited by the part of speech the word belongs to. It follows that the grammatical valency of each word is dependent on the grammatical structure of the language. But it doesn't mean that grammatical valency of words belonging to the same part of speech is necessarily identical. E.g., compare grammatical valency of the words "suggest" and "offer".

Individual meaning of a polysemantic words can be described through its grammatical valency. Thus, different meanings of the adjective keen may be described in a general way through different structures of the word-groups keen + N (keen sight, hearing "острый"), keen + on + N (keen on sports "увлеченный"), keen + inf. (keen to know "сильно желающий").

Word-groups may be classified according to different criteria:

(1) through the order and arrangement of the components:

• a verbal - nominal group (to sew a dress);

• a verbal - prepositional - nominal group (look at something);

(2) by the criterion of distribution, which is the sum of contexts of the language unit usage:

• endocentric, i.e. having one central member functionally equivalent to the whole word-group (blue sky);

• exocentric, i.e. having no central member (become older, side by side);

(3) according to the headword:

• nominal (beautiful garden);

• verbal (to fly high);

• adjectival (lucky from birth);

(4) according to the syntactic pattern:

• predicative (Russian linguists do not consider them to be word-groups);

• non-predicative - according to the type of syntactic relations between the components:

(a) subordinative (modern technology);

(b) coordinative (husband and wife).


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