valency in English

English verbs take from zero to three arguments, so the dimension applies and the values are all attested: weather verbs take none, an intransitive takes one, a transitive two, and a verb of giving three. What the language lacks is any morphology for moving between those numbers. There is no causative affix, no applicative, no antipassive, and above all no reflexive clitic, which in a language that has one does reflexive, reciprocal, middle, anticausative and impersonal duty from a single element. English has no counterpart to that element, and its absence is the largest structural difference this record records.

The operations exist and are carried by frames instead. A causative is built with make, have or get plus a clause, and each of the three imposes different conditions. A passive removes the agent from subject position with a form of be plus the past participle. A ditransitive alternates between two orders of its objects, which rearranges rather than counts. Each of these is a multi-word construction and none is a marking on the verb, which is why the state is periphrastic.

The most striking case has no exponent whatever. A large class of verbs alternates between a one argument use and a two argument use with the identical form in both, so a clause naming a thing that changed and a clause naming what changed it use the same word with no marking to signal the shift. A language with anticausative morphology puts a marker on one side of that alternation; English puts nothing on either. Membership in the class is lexical and has to be learned, since many transitive verbs refuse the intransitive use and many intransitives refuse the transitive one.

The obligatoriness is recorded as conditioned because the constructions apply only where the verb permits them: the passive requires an internal argument, the causative frames select different complement shapes, and the zero alternation is available only to the verbs that happen to allow it.