Abstrakt: | The article is devoted to the analysis of the possible relationships between (full) valency and
synonymy. We first present a very short overview of positions on valency, then we proceed to present
the position of researchers who see a relationship between valency (full, i.e., not distinguishing
arguments from adjuncts and treating them all together as arguments) and synonymy. The article
shows that since a more frequent word would appear in more contexts than a less frequent word, the
more frequent word would tend to have more meanings, and therefore it will have more synonyms,
and being more polysemous it would result in a greater number of full valency frames of that word.
It has been shown that the hypothesis has not been sufficiently precise, because it is the word,
as a form, that can be considered polysemous, but it cannot itself have synonyms: it is only a particular
meaning of this polysemous word that can have them. Therefore, the analyses could not be
sufficiently subtle to identify any relationship, if any, between the two phenomena. On the other
hand, the results of the analyses from this not sufficiently precise starting point did not demonstrate
that there is a significant correlation, let alone dependency, between the two phenomena. Kendall
coefficient, which measures the ordinal association, was estimated at 0.18 in the case of the material
analysed (for the range –1/+1).
It was pointed out at the end that it is not possible to draw from the fact that the differentiation
between arguments and adjuncts is often subtle and sometimes difficult to make, the conclusion
that there is no difference between them, that the problem in fact does not exist, and to refrain from
searching for satisfactory elements and criteria for differentiation of the two categories or to apply
in a consequent way those at our disposal, namely, semantic implication. |