Het ideationele gebruik van want en omdat: een geval van vrije variatie?

Degand, Liesbeth [UCL]

In this article, I will contrast two alternatives for expressing causation in Dutch: the conjunctions 'want' and 'omdat'. From a frequency study in a newspaper corpus it appeared that these connectives are most often used in the same functional context, namely an 'ideational' context. The question I want to tackle here is whether the connectives express exactly the same meaning when they are used in this context, in which case one could speak of a case of free variation in the grammar in which both realisations should always be mutually substitutable. However, if this is not the case, it should be possible to determine the selection rules of either connective. To reach this goal I will focus on one specific aspect that might account for a number of differences between the two connectives: perspectivisation. The theoretical positions will furthermore be quantified in a corpus study.