May I draw your attention to the following publication:

Degand, Liesbeth (2001). Form and Function of Causation. A theoretical
and Empirical Investigation of Causal Constructions in Dutch. Peeters,
Leuven, Paris, Sterling. [Studies op het gebied van de Nederlandse
taalkunde 5].

You can order the book by sending an e-mail to the publisher:
peeters@www.peeters-leuven.be

Summary: The aim of this study is to provide a unified functional
description of a number of causal constructions in Dutch: the
connectives omdat, want, doordat, the prepositions door, vanwege,
wegens, and the auxiliaries doen and laten. Given the observation that
the various causal alternatives are not in free variation in
discourse, the author hypothesizes that this distribution must be
constrained and that it should be possible to identify some of the
constraints that play a role in the selection of these causal
forms. To reach this goal, Degand proposes to make use of a
multifunctional theory of language - Systemic Functional Linguistics -
in combination with numerous corpus analyses. This approach to
language appeared to be particularly relevant, because it enables to
give an explicit account of aspects of language that fall out of the
traditional scope of linguistic description, namely accounts of genre,
register, discourse semantics, etc.  while the corpus analyses provide
a solid empirical basis for the theoretical descriptions.

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Liesbeth Degand
Université catholique de Louvain
Département d'Etudes germaniques
Unité de linguistique germanique
Place B. Pascal, 1
B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
T. 010/474254
F. 010/473774
degand@exco.ucl.ac.be
http://www.exco.ucl.ac.be/ld/ld-engl.htm