The book under review is a very detailed analysis of causatives in Swedish and Dutch, although the former takes precedence. Causative constructions express that one actor or participant caused something to happen or someone to do something; examples of causative verbs in English include have, cause, get, and make. Rawoens differentiates between causativity (kausativitet) and causality (kausalitet); as she explains in the English summary of her book, ‘causativity is used to indicate causal relationships expressed by means of verbs and to refer to the semantic relations in verbal constructions, whereas causality is used as a more general term to indicate causal relationships in reality or to refer to causal relationships expressed by means of word categories other than verbs’ (319). Rawoens’ study focuses primarily on verbs, rather than on, say, conjunctions or other lexical categories, and she creates a typology of verbal causativity in Swedish, then compares it to causativity in Dutch, and finally examines how the respective causative constructions are translated between Swedish and Dutch.
Rawoens’ work, which was her Ph.D. dissertation at Ghent University, starts with a definition of causality and explores how verbal causative constructions are used in Swedish and Dutch, comparing them to non-verbal causal constructions. Conjunctions such as ty ‘because’, trots att ‘even if’, om ‘if’, and även om ‘even if’ in Swedish and als ‘if’, aangenzien ‘because’, omdat ‘because’, and want ‘because’ in Dutch, Swedish adverb or adverbial phrases including därför ‘therefor’ and av det skälet ‘for this reason’, Dutch adverbs like namelijk ‘that is’ and daardoor ‘therefor’, and lexical phrases such as något innebär att ‘something means that’ and det beror på ‘it is due to’ in Swedish and de oorzaak van ‘the reason for’ in Dutch are typical non-verbal causal constructions. Rawoens introduces a typology of causal constructions and exemplifies each type in general before then reviewing their semantic and syntactic attributes on a deeper linguistic level. Rawoens elaborates on the differences between analytical causative constructions and synthetic causatives. Synthetic constructions are defined as ‘causatives where the causative meaning is inherent in the verbal form’ (320), and analytical ones ‘consist of a causative verb plus a complement, e.g. an infinitival complement’ (320). Rawoens gives a detailed account of analytical causative constructions with a thorough discussion of each of the participants (or arguments, as they are also called).
The next section of the book reviews the methodology and material employed in this study and also refers to more general issues of corpus linguistics and what such a corpus study involves. Rawoens mentions which reference books, such as Svenska Akademiens ordbok and Svenska Akademiens grammatik, and which corpora, the Språkbanken (Swedish Language Bank) corpus from the University of Gothenburg and in particular its dual-language Swedish–Dutch SALT (Språkbankens arkiv för länkade texter) project, she employs. She helped compile SALT, together with researchers at the University of Gothenburg, and this corpus will be useful in future work on linguistics and translation studies.
In the fourth section of Kausativa verbkonstruktioner, which is the longest part of the book, Rawoens reviews causative constructions in Swedish. The Swedish verbs she looks at are få ‘get, make’, komma ‘come’, ha ‘have’, förmå ‘persuade’ and låta ‘let’, and she considers them as both main verbs and auxiliaries, depending on their different functions and meanings. For example, kommer is the main verb in Han kommer just från en lektion ‘He is just coming from a lesson’, (135), and an auxiliary referring to the future in Han kommer att arbeta med personalfrågor ‘He'll be working with personnel issues’ (136). Another example is ha, which appears around 1,270 times out of 100,000 words in Gothenburg's Språkbanken corpus. As a main verb, ha can be employed in sentences such as Han har mycket pengar ‘He has a lot of money’ (137). Låta ‘let’ can be both causative and permissive. Rawoens explores its different uses, giving Polisen står ibland vid utfarterna från restaurangerna längs motorvägen och låter alla lunch- och middagsgäster blåsa i en alkometer ‘The police wait by the exits from the restaurants along the motorway and get all the lunch and dinner customers to blow into an alcometer’ as a causative example, and Storbritannien gav stöd åt aktionen genom att låta de två amerikanska B52:orna . . . ‘Great Britain gave its support to the campaign by allowing the two American B52s . . .’ as a permissive.
In the quantitative analysis of the monolingual part of this study, Rawoens finds that få and låta are used much more frequently than komma, förmå and ha, and that the latter three can be viewed as alternatives to få. She suggests that this is because the respective verbs have different functions, including in terms of style and which causal predicates and effected predicates they are combined with, and it is these functions that decide the employment and thereby the frequency.
Rawoens then compares the Dutch causatives doen ‘make/do’ and laten ‘allow, not hinder’ to Swedish få, låta, komma, förmå and ha, drawing on the Dutch–Swedish parallel corpus mentioned above to examine how the various causative constructions are used in both original texts and translations between the two tongues. For this corpus-based comparison, she analyses approximately two million words from fiction and eight hundred thousand words from non-fiction. The corpus of fictional texts is evenly divided between works written in Swedish and those written in Dutch and includes books by Ingmar Bergman (Laterna Magica), Kerstin Ekman (Händelser vid vatten), Anna Enquist (Het meesterstuk), Tim Krabbé (Het gouden ei), Henning Mankell (Mördare utan ansikte), and Monika van Paemel (De eerste steen), while the corpus of non-fictional texts includes only one translation from Dutch to Swedish (Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol's Vrouwen in mannenkleren) and the rest are translations from Swedish to Dutch, such as Karin Johanisson's Den mörka kontinenten: Kvinnan, medicinen och fin-de-siécle and Peter Nilsson's Hem till jorden.
Besides the typological work in this study, i.e. the analysis of the different causatives and how they are employed in the two languages in various situations, Rawoens’ primary finding, as stated in the English-language summary of her book, is that ‘synthetic causatives are commonly used in Swedish, mainly as a translation of Dutch constructions with laten. Dutch, on the other hand, uses more analytical causative constructions – especially with laten – in the translations and more non-verbal causal constructions such as prepositions and adverbials’ (323).
Although there has been work done on causative constructions before, including detailed analysis of Swedish causative constructions, Gudrun Rawoens’ text is the most in-depth study of the topic that this reviewer is aware of. The comparison with causative constructions in Dutch is rather brief – the monolingual Swedish section is around one hundred pages while the Dutch section is a mere twenty pages – but it is nevertheless interesting and beneficial to see how causative constructions function in two closely related Germanic languages. Perhaps future research could be based on this investigation and move outwards to look at more languages and in more detail. Rawoens’ study clearly maps the different ways that causative constructions are used in Swedish and Dutch and the monolingual and dual-language perspectives both offer new understanding of this linguistic feature.
