Valency

Valency

Verbs are combined with other sentence constituents like the subject, the object or adverbials. Verbs can determine the obligatory and/or optional arguments of a sentence. This property is called valency.

Examples
Ich	brauche	heute	unbedingt	ein Auto	für den Möbeltransport.
obligatory		optional	optional	obligatory	optional

Depending on the way verbs are combined with other sentence arguments (subject, object), they are classified as follows:

	Examples	Description
personal	ich spiele, du schreibst	subject in the 1st, 2nd or 3rd person
impersonal	es regnet, es schneit	the impersonal es is always the only subject
transitive	ich brauche Hilfe	object in the accusative
intransitive	ich helfe dir	object not in the accusative
reflexive	ich wasche mich	subject and object are identical
reciprocal	wir treffen uns	a mutual relation between multiple subjects and objects is expresssed