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Abstract
With the frequency data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the valency information in the Valency Dictionary of English, the paper investigates quantitative properties of English verb valency. The results show: (1) the number of variants of English verbs follows the positive negative binomial distribution; (2) the complementation patterns of verbs and adjectives in English follow a power law, while that of nouns obeys the Zipf-Mandelbrot distribution; (3) the greater the valency of a verb, the shorter the verb is; (4) in comparison with less frequent verbs, the frequent ones have greater valency; (5) the greater the polysemy of a word, the greater its valency is.
Acknowledgements
We thank JQL referees for insightful comments, Xu Chunshan for improving our English, Liu Bingli for preparing the data. This work is partly supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 09BYY024).
Notes
1The valency dictionary used by them is the Czech valency lexicon Vallex 1.0 (http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/vallex/1.0/).
2Here, we use static to describe the aspects from the dictionary and dynamic to describe the aspects from the text or corpus.
3The example is cited by http://www.patternbank.uni-erlangen.de/cgi-bin/patternbank.cgi?do=wsq&shw=provide. The explanation of these symbols can be found on the same website.
4We measure the correlation with all the values of the dependent variable.