In our article, we start by posing the question why some adjectival stems can end both in -ful and -less, while others take only one of the endings. Together these items make up around 1% of the entries in a good dictionary. It soon becomes clear that we need to use several basic concepts from cognitive linguistics to answer our question: boundedness, mass vs individual, part-whole relations and container metaphors. By so doing we can divide the -ful and -less items into a number of subgroups with different semantics. The most important aspect of their semantics, however, is that both -ful and -less express deviations from our expectations of how the normal world is structured. In other words, they represent the world by negating it.

In this article it is argued on the basis of English and Danish data that modal meanings traditionally discussed as semantic properties of the modal auxiliaries are derived from intra- and extra-sentential context. On the basis of preferred readings the article illustrates and discusses some of the central variables which determine the assignment of modal meaning to a sentence in a context of utterance.

This paper deals with anaphoric expressions in news reports. It is argued that many aspects of discourse anaphora cannot be accounted for within the dominant cognitive paradigm, where anaphoric NPs are conceived of as representations of invariant and universal psychological phenomena. As demonstrated in the paper, anaphoric NPs are intertwined with different social and ideological processes. Anaphoric NPs can for example be used to individuate the main character to a lesser or greater degree, a use that in turn can be seen as a manifestation of basic news values, such as personalization and objectivity.