Valency is traditionally thought of as a property of verbs. The present work is an attempt to explore valency as a property of all kinds of linguistic signs - words, morphemes, and signs with non-phonemic expression. An important distinction is made between semantic and syntactic signs, and amongst semantic signs - between signs with and without valency. More than 800 valency structures have been identified. A large material illustrating these structures makes up the major part of this book. A good knowledge of the Russian language is necessary in order to understand this book.