Subcategorization

In linguistics, subcategorization denotes the ability/necessity for lexical items (usually verbs) to require/allow the presence and types of the syntactic arguments with which they co-occur.[1] For example, the word "walk" as in "X walks home" requires the noun-phrase X to be animate.

The notion of subcategorization is similar to the notion of valency,[2] although the two concepts (subcategorization and valency) stem from different traditions in the study of syntax and grammar.

  1. ^ Chomsky (1965) is a prominent early source on the concept of subcategorization.
  2. ^ The valency concept in linguistics is originally from Tesnière (1959).