Gudrun Rawoens (Universitetet i Gent, Belgien): ”A study of causative constructions in Swedish and Danish based on translations.”

In this paper I will present the results from a translation study of causative constructions in Swedish and Danish. First, I will give an overview of various expressions of causality in modern Swedish and Danish, comprising verbal and non-verbal constructions. The non-verbal constructions include e.g. causal conjunctions and prepositions. Among the verbal constructions there are both lexical and productive causatives (cf Shibatani 1976). The group of productive causatives contains analytical causative constructions and morphological causatives. Whereas the latter are practically non-existent in Swedish and Danish, the former are very frequent in both languages (for Swedish see Rawoens 2008). In the second part of the presentation, the main focus is on Swedish and Danish analytical causative constructions that are studied from a contrastive perspective. An overview of the translation patterns is given (e.g. the Danish translations of the Swedish causatives få and låta). The material used for this study is taken from a translation corpus containing Swedish texts and their Danish translations.

Rawoens, Gudrun. 2008. Kausativa verbkonstruktioner i svenskan och nederländskan. En korpusbaserad syntaktisk-semantisk undersökning. (Göteborgsstudier i nordisk språkvetenskap 11) Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet.

Shibatani, Masayoshi. 1976. The grammar of causative constructions: A conspectus. I: Shibatani,

Masayoshi (red.), Syntax and Semantics 6: The Grammar of Causative Constructions. New York: Academic Press, s. 1–40.