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.