Subcategorization

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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.