Abstract The aim of the article is to introduce a new approach to verb valency analysis. This approach – full valency – observes properties of verbs which occur solely in actual language usage. The term “full valency” means that all arguments, without distinguishing complements (obligatory arguments governed by the verb) and adjuncts (optional arguments directly dependent on the predicate verb), are taken into account. Because of an expectation that full valency reflects some mechanism which governs verb behaviour in a language, hypotheses concerning (1) the distribution of full valency frames, (2) the relationship between the number of valency frames and the frequency of the verb, and (3) the relationship between the number of valency frames and verb length were tested empirically. To test the hypotheses, a Czech syntactically annotated corpus – the Prague Dependency Treebank – was used.