This book is a general comparative study of sentence structure in Swedish and French. It focuses on the differences (and to some extent the similarities) that the two languages present in their way of structuring sentences into clauses and phrases. It is based on a corpus consisting of substantial extracts (1000 successive clauses in each text) from 40 Swedish contemporary literary texts in original Swedish language and in French translation. The possibility of using translation texts for the purpose of carrying out an investigation in the field of contrastive linguistics is discussed in the Introduction.

The study indicates that the French sentence has a structural identity of its own, quite distinct from that of a Germanic language like Swedish.

It is shown that French constituents (clauses and phrases) are combined to form sentences in a way which is fundamentally and systematically very different from the way sentences are formed in Swedish. This is the case both in terms of frequency and in terms of syntactic distribution.

Some tests are applied in order to ensure the statistical validity of results obtained in the quantitative part of the book (pp. 41-90).