Review of Hellqvist, Birgitta (2015) Le gérondif en français et les structures correspondantes en suédois.

Abstract

In this book, the author examines a French structure that has gained a lot of attention in the last two decades, viz. the gerund. A comparison of its usage in French with the corresponding structures in Swedish shows (1) the multifunctionality of the French gerund and (2) the way Swedish translators deal with this multifunctionality. The study is exclusively synchronic and descriptive. The first chapter presents mainly the corpus of the study, which contains 13 original French and 13 original Swedish novels and their Swedish and French translations (52 novels in total). It also presents the theoretical framework, which is almost entirely built on the work of Swedish authors (e.g. Halmøy 2003) and on Kleiber (e.g. 2007, 2009). The absence of a general framework and of modern theories is one of the weakest points of the book.