Dependency Grammar and Valency Theory

The best way to introduce a reader to dependency grammar (DG) and valency theory (VT) - both come out of the same research tradition - is to present the syntactic theory of Lucien Tesniere, which is still relevant today (section 10.1). In the following sections we will give an overview of the development, current state, and possible future concerns first of VT (section 10.2), then of DG (section 10.3). However, this chapter can only give a rough outline of DG and VT; a comprehensive research overview can be found in the two volumes of the Handbook of Dependency and Valency (Agel et al. 2003; 2006), which features altogether 121 articles in German or English. The present section is organized as follows: sections 10.1.2 and 10.1.3 introduce Tesniere's DG and VT, while section 10.1.4 outlines the central properties of a modern DG and VT.