The volume deals with valency phenomena in verbs and complex deverbal lexical structures (nominalizations, adjectivizations and compounds) in a variety of languages (English, Polish, Hungarian, Norwegian, Greek, Hebrew, Bantu languages and the West African language Ga). The introduction offers an overview of valency related issues and up-to-date linguistic literature. The eleven contributions address specific problems, such as the interaction of valency with argument- and event-structure, properties of light verbs, impersonal constructions, antipassives, analogies between passivization and nominalization/adjectivization, effects of verbal prefixation, and synthetic compounds. The proposed analyses are couched in lexically and syntactically driven approaches.

This book contributes to the recent theoretical developments in the area of mutual interactions of valency and aspect, as expressed in different types of verb-related nominal structures (nominalizations and synthetic compounds). A wide range of data from Slavic, Hellenic, Germanic, Romance and Semitic languages provides an empirical testing ground for competing theoretical explanations couched in the lexicalist and construction-based frameworks.