This paper seeks to explain syntactic and structural features that have puzzled earlier scholars and editors of poems composed in kviÐuháttr, one of the oldest attested Old Norse skaldic meters. More precisely, I attempt to answer the following questions: first, why do poems in kviÐuháttr fail to adhere to the stanzaic eight-line division and the four-line helmingr (half-stanza) division, which are so firmly entrenched in the ON skaldic tradition? Second, why does the syntax of kviÐuháttr poetry depart from other patterns of skaldic (and eddic) verb syntax? It will become clear that the metrical innovation that characterizes kviÐuháttr, namely, the introduction of regularized catalectic a-lines of Sievers' Types A, C, and D, imposed significant restrictions on verb syntax. Rather than violating the verb-second constraint in independent clauses, the poets were forced to relax structural rules that are observed strictly in other branches of ON poetry.I am grateful to my colleague, Robert D. Fulk, for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Thanks also to the two anonymous JGL reviewers for valuable suggestions.

This paper discusses the auxiliated posture verb constructions in Dutch (liggen/zitten/staan+te+V ‘sit/lie/stand to V’) that have progressive, durative, or habitual interpretation. My analysis, based on a large corpus of written texts, reveals, first of all, that to a large extent these constructions follow the regular (that is, non-aspectual) use of the three cardinal posture verbs as basic locational verbs. Second, the corpus used for the present study reveals clear experientially based patterns in the type of verbs that occur in the auxiliated posture verb construction. The data suggest that, at least in the written language, the construction has retained a link with the postural (or by extension, the locational) source. This sheds light on some clear semantic differences between the auxiliated posture verb constructions and another common progressive construction in Dutch, aan het V zijn ‘be at the V-inf’. The paper also briefly considers the progressive construction lopen+te+V ‘run to V’, showing that it is less grammaticalized and still predominantly tied to motion events.I would like to thank the anonymous referees of this journal for their comments on a previous version of this paper. Responsibility for any remaining inaccuracies is, of course, mine.