Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2018
Abstract
In my paper I focus on the neglected link between noun valency and contextual boundness of a noun phrase. Linguists maintain that the expression of the valency complement of a noun is never obligatory; in my paper I attempt to show that this view is rather imprecise.
Analyzing the valency-related behavior of two nouns (attempt and ability) in the British National Corpus, I show that the above-mentioned belief about non-obligatoriness of the complements of nouns is imprecise, being rather hard to square with the empirical evidence. The expression of the valency complement of a noun does seems to be obligatory if the respective noun phrase is contextually non-bound.