This paper summarizes current findings in the cross‐linguistic study of meteorological constructions. It provides both a typology of weather events and a typology of encoding formats used for the expression of weather in and across languages. The discussion shows that there is a correlation between these two parameters: there are clear tendencies in the distribution of the various encoding types across the various event types. This gives rise to a typology of languages which explains linguistic variation in the encoding of meteorological events.

This paper is a cross-linguistic investigation of meteorological expressions (such as it is snowing or the wind blows). The paper proposes a three-fold typology of meteorological constructions according to the element primarily responsible for the coding of weather. In the predicate type, a predicate expresses the meteorological event, while an argument has other functions. In the argument type, an argument is responsible for expressing weather, while any eventual predicate is semantically rather vacuous. In the argument-predicate type, finally, both a predicate and an argument are involved. All types include subtypes, depending on the syntactic valency and the parts of speech of the elements involved. Building upon the typology of constructions, a typology of languages is also proposed based on the coding of precipitation and temperature.

The purpose of the study was to estimate the increment of dental caries among dental students in Helsinki, who acquired good knowledge of caries prevention during their studies. The group (59 students) was examined twice with an interval of 20.2 +/- 4.1 months. Clinical findings, augmented with bitewing radiographs and an orthopantomogram, were recorded separately for each tooth surface, and individual DMFS and DS index scores were computed. In addition, the students were interviewed with regard to oral hygiene, topical fluoride application, and dietary habits. The mean DMFS and DS index scores at the first examination were 45.0 and 9.1, respectively. At the second examination, DMFS was 46.4 and the number of new decayed surfaces per student 0.54/year. Both the latter values indicated that caries progression was slow. The increment of dental caries among the dental students was much smaller than that observed earlier among other groups of university students in Finland. Further evidence that caries progression among the dental students was slow was provided by the finding that of the 318 incipient caries lesions recorded at the first examination, no more than 11 had developed into clinical caries by 20 months.