Kausativa verbkonstruktioner i svenskan och nederländskan: en korpusbaserad syntaktisk-semantisk undersökning

This doctoral dissertation consists of six chapters which together seek to accomplish a threefold aim. The first aim is to present a typology of linguistic expressions of causality in Swedish and Dutch which comprises both verbal and non-verbal realisation patterns. The verbal construction types contain synthetic and analytical causative constructions while non-verbal expressions of causality comprise constructions with e.g. conjunctions and prepositions. The second aim is to present a quantitative and qualitative analysis of periphrastic causative constructions with an infinitival complement in Swedish. The qualitative analysis departs from an analysis of the central verbs (the causal predicate and the result predicate) and of the central arguments (CAUSER, CAUSEE en AFFECTEE). The underlying assumption is that the different analytical causative constructions with the different causal predicates få, komma, ha, förmå and låta express different types of causation. Central parameters in discerning the different causation types are animateness, intention and control of the participants. The analysis is conducted within the theoretical framework of Functional Grammar according to Dik (1997a, 1997b) and is based on the Språkbanken corpora as well as elicitated data. The analysis shows that the different analytical causative constructions in Swedish indeed express different types of causation such as indirect causation or involuntary causation. The third aim is to present an analysis of periphrastic causative constructions in a Dutch-Swedish contrastive perspective based on the Dutch-Swedish parallel corpus which was compiled for these purposes. An overview of the translation patterns is given (e.g. the Swedish translations of the Dutch causatives doen and laten and the Dutch translations of the Swedish causatives få, komma, ha, förmå and låta). Special attention is paid to the influence of language-specific features and translation strategies on the basis of a bidrectional approach. One result from this investigation is that the relation between the analytical causative constructions and their translations is asymmetrical and that one-to-one relations do not represent the majority of the cases. Moreover, synthetic causatives appear to be more common in Swedish whereas Dutch uses more analytical causative constructions – especially with laten – and more non-verbal causal constructions such as prepositions and adverbials