which incorporates all four arguments as pronominal prefixes on the verb).: p. 57 The term valence also refers to the syntactic category of these elements. Verbs show considerable variety in this respect. In the examples above, the arguments are noun phrases (NPs), but arguments can in many cases be other categories, e.g. Winning the prize made our training worthwhile. – Subject is a non-finite verb phrase That he came late did not surprise us. – Subject is a clause Sam persuaded us to contribute to the cause. – Object is a non-finite verb phrase The president mentioned that she would veto this bill. – Object is a clause Many of these patterns can appear in a form rather different from the ones just shown above. For example, they can also be expressed using the passive voice: Our training was made worthwhile (by winning the prize). We were not surprised (by the fact that he came late). We were persuaded to contribute (by Sam). That she would veto this bill was mentioned (by the president). The above examples show some of the most common valence patterns in English, but do not begin to exhaust them. Other linguists have examined the patterns of more than three thousand verbs and placed them in one or more of several dozen groups. The verb requires all of its arguments in a well-formed sentence, although they can sometimes undergo valency reduction or expansion. For instance, to eat is naturally divalent, as in he eats an apple, but may be reduced to monovalency in he eats. This is called valency reduction. In the southeastern United States, an emphatic trivalent form of eat is in use, as in I'll eat myself some supper. Verbs that are usually monovalent, like sleep, cannot take a direct object. However, there are cases where the valency of such verbs can be expanded, for instance in He sleeps the sleep of death. This is called valency expansion. Verb valence can also be described in terms of syntactic versus semantic criteria. The syntactic valency of a verb refers to the number and type of dependent arguments that the verb can have, while semantic valence describes the thematic relations associated with a verb. Compared with subcategorization Tesnière 1959 expresses the idea of valence as follows (translation from French): Tesnière used the word actants to mean what are now widely called arguments (and sometimes complements). An