This article examines the semantic structure of the Norwegian preposition mot ‘towards, against’, and suggests an analysis within cognitive semantics where it is argued that the various senses of this word are best accounted for in terms of a family resemblance category, with two interrelated image schemas, SOURCE-PATH-GOAL and FORCE DYNAMICS, as its basic senses. Other senses are treated as extensions, for the most part metaphorical, of these two basic senses. The study builds on a corpus of Norwegian texts from various genres.

Based on data from Danish, this article examines various linguistic means of expressing causation. It is argued that inchoatives, causatives and accomplishments all denote situations in which one situation – subevent1, is construed as causing another – subevent2. Inchoatives and causatives are described as having different kinds of underspecified subevent1. The bulk of the article is concerned with an analysis of prepositional phrases of a type termed Process Specifying Adverbials, (PSAs). It is argued that PSAs serve to specify subevent1, and their behaviour is seen as corroborating the proposed analysis for inchoatives and causatives. The analysis is formalized within the framework of HPSG.

This paper presents data from Modern Icelandic of a small group of Dat-Nom verbs which select for two arguments: a Dative human argument and a Nominative stimulus. When applying independently established subjecthood tests on these arguments it turns out that both pass the tests, i.e. both arguments can behave like subjects and like objects, but not at the same time. An examination of the lexical meanings of these predicates reveals that they can be divided into the following main groups: Emotive verbs, Perception Verbs, Cognition Verbs, Verbs of Attitude and Benefactive verbs. A Construction Grammar analysis is proposed, assuming two different syntactic constructions to exist in Icelandic, i.e. a Dat-Nom construction versus a Nom-Dat construction. It is argued that the occurrence of these predicates in the two constructions follows directly from their conceptual causal structure. Furthermore, the choice of subject seems to be contextually determined, i.e. the more topical argument takes on the subject function. The relation between the two constructions, i.e. the Dat-Nom and the Nom-Dat, seems to be like the relation between an ordinary transitive construction and its topicalization construction, in that when the lower argument is “topicalized” to first position the other construction is activated, hence the ordinary topicalization construction in Icelandic is not as readily available to these verbs as the other construction is.

In many languages the syllabification of intervocalic consonants has been shown to be influenced by the principle of onset maximization, whereby as many segments are assigned to the subsequent syllable as are phonotactically legal. Icelandic, however, has been repeatedly argued to follow a coda maximization strategy even though opinion has remained divided on this. This paper is an attempt to address this issue from the psycholinguistic perspective. The results of two experiments leave little doubt that the proper syllabification in Icelandic is onset maximization rather than coda maximization, thereby aligning Icelandic with many other languages and providing further support for the onset maximization principle. A number of other aspects were investigated, including the special status of certain two-consonant clusters, preaspiration and gemination. Clusters with a maximum sonority difference between their constituents were found to tend towards tautosyllabicity, whereas those with a smaller sonority difference gravitate towards heterosyllabicity. Furthermore, there is at least some evidence for the claim that both preaspiration and gemination lend themselves to an analysis in terms of a sequence of two identical consonants at the underlying level.