Saturday, January 22, 2005

What is Valency?

Valency refers to the capacity of a verb to take a specific number and type of arguments (noun phrase positions).

The terminology comes from chemistry, in which the valency of a chemical element is its capacity for combining with a fixed number of atoms of another element—for example, hydrogen can bond with only one other element, and is called monovalent.

Verbs can be divided into classes based on their valency (how many arguments or ‘valents’ they can take). In some languages, these classes may have distinctive morphosyntactic characteristics, such as unique case marking patterns, or restrictions on tense/aspect/modality marking.



Valency is the combining power of an element (i.e. the number of bonds which the atom can form with other atoms).

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

I made a frittata for dinner tonight. Boiled new potatoes, spinach, capers, roasted red peppers, tomatoes, edam cheese. And garlic and red chilis. It was delicious, a new meal I have learned to prepare. Kind of like a quiche without the fattening butter crust. The best part, I made a whole pan, and there are now leftovers to lunch on tomorrow. I want to make a concerted effort to get away from packaged foods, too much garbage comes out of my house. Tonight, there was the paper carton for the eggs, and the jars for roasted peppers, capers, the wrapping for the cheese. Minimal, but I think I can do better.

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

The things we like to hear:

Coughs melt away with chocolate

Monday, January 17, 2005