LINGUIST List 14.3350

Fri Dec 5 2003

Diss: Typology: de Alencar: 'Lexikalische...'

Editor for this issue: Takako Matsui <takolinguistlist.org>

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  • Leonel.de.Alencar, Lexikalische Variation am Beispiel dynamischer Verben

    Message 1: Lexikalische Variation am Beispiel dynamischer Verben

     Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 21:42:21 -0500 (EST)
    From: Leonel.de.Alencar <Leonel.de.Alencarweb.de>
    Subject: Lexikalische Variation am Beispiel dynamischer Verben


    Institution: University of Konstanz Program: Department of Linguistics Dissertation Status: Completed Degree Date: 2003

    Author: Leonel Figueiredo de Alencar

    Dissertation Title: Lexikalische Variation am Beispiel dynamischer Verben des Deutschen und des Portugiesischen

    Dissertation URL: http://www.ub.uni-konstanz.de/kops/volltexte/2003/1076/

    Linguistic Field: Typology, Text/Corpus Linguistics, Syntax, Semantics, Language Description, Computational Linguistics

    Subject Language: Portuguese (code: POR) German, Standard (code: GER)

    Subject Language Family: Romance (code: ) Germanic (code: )

    Dissertation Director 1: Christoph Schwarze Dissertation Director 2: Dieter Wunderlich

    Dissertation Abstract:

    This PhD thesis focuses on the connection between the syntactic and semantic variation of German and Portuguese dynamic verbs. Following Lexical Decomposition Grammar (LDG), I assume that the increase in the syntactic valency of a verb results from semantic operations that add one or more predicates to the underlying basic verb predicate. The verb "schlagen" 'hit', for instance, is a prototypical dynamic verb. In this study, I demonstrate that contrasts between such German dynamic verbs and their Portuguese counterparts result from the different variation potential of dynamic verbs in both languages. In the last years, Romance and Germanic languages have been the subject of numerous contrastive studies, aiming at a more precise classification of individual languages according to the path and manner language distinction. In these analyses, however, Portuguese has been so far hardly considered. This dissertation provides a corpus-based investigation into the semantic and syntactic variation in a sample of German and Portuguese dynamic verbs. A gap in contrastive Germanic and Romance linguistics is thus covered here. As a main result, it is found out that Portuguese behaves as an atypical path language, because it licenses a mechanism that can expand its motion verbs set, namely the resultative extension of a monovalent or bivalent verb. Therefore, as far as the semantics and syntax of motion verbs are concerned, Portuguese is closer to a manner language such as German than French is. To my knowledge, no parallel lexical flexibility was ever detected in any other Romance language. Nevertheless, resultative extension is more restricted and less productive in Portuguese than in German. In Portuguese, it is only applicable to verbs of physical force exertion. Two resultative extension operations are available in Portuguese: STRONG_RESULTATIVE and WEAK_RESULTATIVE. The former operation adds an oblique complement to the basic verb frame. This additional complement can be realised either by a dynamic or by a static element, which, however, must be spatial. In German, in contrast, the resultative predicate added by STRONG_RESULTATIVE can be coded either by a dynamic element (e.g. a directional PP) or by an element not marked for dynamicity (e.g. a non-spatial AP). The operation WEAK_RESULTATIVE, which is not available in German, differs from STRONG_RESULTATIVE in that the added oblique must be realised by a spatial dynamic element. In this work, it is demonstrated that the resultative templates proposed by Wunderlich (2000) cannot account for the German and Portuguese data. The operations STRONG_RESULTATIVE and WEAK_RESULTATIVE constitute an improvement of his proposal. In both languages, dynamic verbs can also be extended with a possessive relation, which projects an indirect object. Portuguese, however, is more flexible than German in this respect. Verbs such as "werfen" 'throw' can only be extended with a possessive relation if they are also expanded by means of STRONG_RESULTATIVE. The Portuguese analogues, though, are not constrained in this way. On the other hand, they also license the successive application of both possessive and resultative extension.