Polyvalent adjectives: A challenge for theory-driven approaches to valency

• Most research on valency has been concerned with verbs.
• The article investigates the neglected area of adjectival valency.
• The data consists of 181 polyvalent adjectives occurring in 956 valency constructions.
• Arguably, theory-driven models of valency cannot account for the whole range of valency phenomena.
• The findings support the view that valency belongs to the idiosyncratic aspects of language.

The article presents a corpus-based investigation of polyvalent adjectives in Norwegian, and the following basic theoretical questions are assessed in light of these data: Do predicators like verbs and adjectives take complements? If yes: Is complement realisation predictable on the basis of the semantic structure of the predicator, including its complements? Two of the main theory-driven approaches to valency, the Projectionist model and the Exoskeletal model, provide very different answers to these questions in that the former assumes that valency is rule-based, whereas the latter assumes that predicators can in principle be freely inserted into any syntactic frame. The data studied suggest that the answer lies somewhere in between these extreme positions: Predicators do take complements in the sense that specific complementation patterns are idiosyncratically connected to individual predicators, but predicators to not project a certain syntactic frame. Hence, even though predicators do not uniquely project a certain syntactic frame, their combinations with syntactic frames are to a large extent idiosyncratic.