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.

Our long-term goal is to contribute to the integration of formal and lexical semantics. Our more immediate theoretical starting point is the idea of “text as theory”, within a model-theoretic semantic framework. We describe a set of empirical problems in the domain of genitive modifiers that offers a challenge to theories of the integration of lexical, compositional, and contextual information. After sketching a solution, we raise the issue of metonymy in the interpretation of genitives, and examine the role of sortal information in the specification of underspecified meanings and in processes of type-shifting and sort-shifting, including metonymy.

This paper investigates the status of the lexicon and the possibilities for expressing lexical generalizations in the paradigm of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). We illustrate that the architecture readily supports the use of implicational principles to express generalizations over a class of word objects. A second kind of lexical generalizations expressing relations between classes of words is often expressed in terms of lexical rules. We show how lexical rules can be integrated into the formal setup for HPSG developed by King (1989, 1994), investigate a lexical rule specification language allowing the linguist to only specify those properties which are supposed to differ between the related classes, and define how this lexical rule specification language is interpreted. We thereby provide a formalization of lexical rules as used in 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.

Following the spirit of Relativized Extreme Functionalism, I argue that a set of grammatical features, traditionally thought of as devoid of semantics, lexical class (declension and conjugation), in fact has semantic content. Taking Josefsson (1995. 1997. 1998) as a point of departure, I suggest that the lexical class determines the word class of a word, hence relating the word to a major ontological category such as THING and EVENT. A certain lexical class may correspond to a semantic subclass of a major ontological category, but this does not need to be the case. The approach taken explains certain morphological phenomena in Swedish, such as stem vowels, and explains why the non-head part of a compound is undetermined for major ontological category.

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.

Based on a functional approach, the article proposes a role for lexical knowledge in human languages in relation to syntactic and encyclopaedic knowledge. A lexicon presupposes encyclopaedic knowledge in terms of which the semantic domain of lexical items can be defined – but this does not mean that there is no distinction between lexicon and encyclopaedia, only that one stands on the shoulders of the other. Syntax similarly presupposes a lexicon: there can be no combinations without items to be combined, whereas you can have (holophrastic) languages consisting solely of items. However, inside the domain of human, i.e. syntactically organized languages, syntax and lexicon presuppose each other: lexical items below full utterance size make no sense except in relation to a combinatory syntax, and a combinatory syntax presupposes elements that can enter into combinations.