Western, Jespersen and Vinje have called attention to the occurence in Norwegian of a for complementizer, which, like its English counterpart, introduces infinitive clauses with an overt subject. This paper attempts to find out whether the for that occurs in various types of sentences containing a for + NP + å infinitive sequence can really be analysed as a complementizer. The conclusion is that this Norwegian for is a squishy category: though most of the syntactic and semantic facts conflict with a complemtizer analysos, there is some interesting semantic and syntactic evidence (viz. a violation of the verb second constraint) that argues in favour of complementizer status.

This article uses evidence from Danish to test the hierarchies of consonant strength set up in Foley (1977). It is argued that Danish provides evidence to show that the α hierarchy (the hierarchy based on place of articulation) cannot be universal, and may not have any predictive power. There is also some evidence to suggest that some of Foley's other hierarchies may require some minor changes.