Valenze

Valenze is the plural form of valenza, a term used in several disciplines to denote the capacity or value that a component contributes to a system. In English technical writing the concept appears as valence in chemistry, valence or valency in linguistics, and emotional valence in psychology. The word derives from Latin valentia and entered modern vocabularies via French valence.

In chemistry, valence describes an atom’s bonding capacity—the number of bonds it can form or electrons it can share or transfer to complete its outer shell. Valence is related to oxidation state but not identical. For main-group elements, valence roughly equals the group number—hydrogen 1, carbon 4, oxygen 2. Some elements show expanded valence in covalent compounds, and transition metals may use d‑orbitals to increase bonding options. Valence underpins Lewis structures and molecular geometry.

In linguistics, valence (valenza) refers to the number and type of arguments a predicate requires. A verb may be intransitive (one argument), transitive (two), or ditransitive (three). Valence theories explain sentence structure, argument roles, and how languages encode relationships among participants.

In psychology, emotional valence denotes the intrinsic positivity or negativity of a stimulus. Positive valence is pleasant, negative valence is unpleasant. Valence interacts with arousal to influence attention, memory, and choice, and is widely used in affective science and applied fields such as user experience research.

Together, valenze describe a common idea: the capacity to bind, affect, or value components within a system, across disciplines.