First published in Web Journal of Modern Language Linguistics. © 2000 Jonathan West.
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German-English Verb Valency is a contrastive analysis of the dependency structures of German and English verbs. This is a timely publication, as interest in valency is growing for two reasons. First, we have a growing recognition on the part of syntacticians of the importance of what they call subcategorization frames (see e.g. Ouhalla 1994:36-38). Second, dependency grammarians are beginning to turn their attention to English once more (a conference on valency in English and German is planned for September 2001 - contact i.f.roe@reading.ac.uk, fischerk@lgu.ac.uk, Alan.Cornell@pbs.plym.ac.uk). This interest is not new. Pioneering work was done by Emons (1974, 1978), Allerton (1982), and Hickey (1980), always inspired by work in German, but it has always been submerged by the flood of publications in what its adherents are pleased to call the main stream.