Valence Changing Operation (definition)

Valence changing operations describe syntactic alternations in which the number of arguments of a verb (i.e., its syntactic valence) changes. These alternations are thought to be the result of operations which increase or decrease the lexically-determined valence of a verb. passivization, for instance, demotes a core argument (the subject) to a non-core argument, and optionally deletes it. Other valence changing operations include causatives, applicatives, reflexives, and so on.

See Also

• Voice
• Argument
• Valence

External Links

• wikipedia article on Valency: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valency_(linguistics)