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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' is a prototypical dynamic verb. In (1a), the result of the verb action is coded by a directional PP. In (1b), its Portuguese counterpart appears in a similar syntactic configuration. In (2) and (3), however, these two verbs show a contrasting behaviour. In this study, I demonstrate that these contrasts result from the different variation potential of dynamic verbs in both languages. (1) a. Der Radioamateur schlägt Erdungsstäbe in den Boden. b. O radioamador bate no chão barras de aterramento. 'The radio amateur pounds grounding rods into the soil' (2) a. Der Randalierer schlug die Figur in Stücke. b. * O desordeiro bateu a estátua em pedaços. 'The rioters hit the figure into pieces' (3) a. Der Mann schlug das Tier bewußtlos. b. * O homem bateu o animal inconsciente. 'The man knocked the animal unconscious' 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 ...
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