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13th International Conference
on Functional Grammar
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| A functional approach to causative
constructions in Swedish |
Gudrun Rawoens,
Universiteit Gent, Gent, Belgium
This paper focuses on one particular type of analytical
causative constructions in modern Swedish, viz. where the
causal predicate is a grammaticalized verb followed by an
infinitival complement containing the effected predicate. The
causal predicates that can occur in
this type of construction are få
‘get’, komma ‘come’,
ha ‘have’, förmå
‘induce, persuade’ and låta
‘let’. This type of construction is illustrated by the
following example featuring the causal predicate få:
Det höga kaffepriset får
allt fler brasilianska odlare att plantera mer kaffe. (Press95)
’The high coffee price makes more and more
Brazilian growers plant more coffee.’
The
quantitative analysis shows that the verbs få
and låta are the
most frequent causatives occurring in this type of
construction. The verbs komma,
ha and förmå can be
considered as an alternative to få.
However, their frequency is relatively low due to semantic and
stylistic restrictions. It can further be observed that none
of these four verbs is interchangeable with låta
since this causative covers a slightly different scale of
meanings ranging from purely causative to permissive. Even at
the syntactic level låta is different from the other four verbs. It has for instance
more auxiliary-like features in that it combines with a bare
infinitive whereas the other four verbs combine with an att-(‘to’)infinitive.
In the qualitative part of the study I will try to account for
the frequency discrepancies between the different causal
predicates by analysing the semantic factors that determine
the occurrence of one particular verb instead of another. The
investigation starts from an analysis of the verbs and their
nuclear arguments. The general theoretical framework for this
study is Functional Grammar according to Dik (1997 a, b). An
extension of Dik’s functional model is used to describe the
semantic properties of the main participants in the
constructions mentioned. Animacy and control are central
parameters in discerning different semantic types among the
nuclear arguments, while dynamism and control are central in
the description of the aktionsarter of the verbs.
The basic assumption is that each analytical causative
construction is unique and expresses a different causation
type. It will be shown that various causation types in the
different analytical causative constructions are determined by
the participants in combination with the nature of the verbs
involved – both the causal predicate and the effected
predicate.
The study is based on a selection of the Språkbanken ‘the
Swedish Language Bank’ corpora containing 40 million words
of Swedish newspaper texts. The causative constructions were
manually extracted and marked up with functional tags.
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| References: |
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Dik,
Simon C. 1997a. The
Theory of Functional Grammar, Part I: The Structure of the
Clause. Edited by Kees Hengeveld. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
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Dik,
Simon C. 1997b. The
Theory of Functional Grammar, Part II: Complex and Derived
Constructions. Edited by Kees Hengeveld. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
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