Английского

§ 11. The inner qualities of any signemic lingual unit are mani-
fested not only in its immediate informative significance in an ut-
terance, but also in its combinability with other units, in particular 
with units of the same segmental order. These syntagmatic proper-
ties are of especial importance for verbs, which is due to the unique 
role performed by the verb in the sentence. As a matter of fact, the 
finite verb, being the centre of predication, organises all the other 
sentence constituents. Thus, the organisational function of the verb, 
immediately exposed in its syntagmatic combinability, is insepara-
ble from (and dependent on) its semantic value. The morphological 
relevance of the combining power of the verb is seen from the fact 
that directly dependent on this power are the categorial voice dis-
tinctions. 
The combining power of words in relation to other words in syn-
tactically subordinate positions (the positions of "adjuncts" — see 
Ch. XX) is called their syntactic "valency". The valency of a word 
is said to be "realised" when the word in question is actually com-
bined in an utterance with its corresponding valency partner, i. e. 
its valency adjunct. If, 

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on the other hand, the word is used without its valency adjunct, the 
valency conditioning the position of this adjunct (or "directed" to 
it) is said to be "not realised". 
The syntactic valency falls into two cardinal types: obligatory and 
optional. 
The obligatory valency is such as must necessarily be realised for 
the sake of the grammatical completion of the syntactic construc-
tion. For instance, the subject and the direct object are obligatory 
parts of the sentence, and, from the point of view of sentence struc-
ture, they are obligatory valency partners of the verb. Conse-
quently, we say that the subjective and the direct objective valen-
cies of the verb are obligatory. E.g.: We saw a house in the dis-
tance. 
This sentence presents a case of a complete English syntactic con-
struction. If we eliminate either its subject or object, the remaining