This article addresses what in Swedish linguistic terminology is commonly known as the "med-phrase" ("with-phrase"). It is an attempt at showing that this phrase, although formally a prepositional phrase, is not functionally one. It is argued that its preposition is an exclusively grammatical element devoid of semantic content and that the phrase it introduces is syntactically an "absolute construction", incompatible with the adverbial function and distinguished only in form from its non-prepositional counterpart.The article consists of three case studies, each dealing with a particular type of the med/with-phrase: (I) A man entered the room with a book in his hand; (II) I think it's terrible with what happened at the World Trade Center; (III) Try looking at things from a new point of view just as you do with your writing. Apart from argumentation drawing on internally Swedish linguistic evidence, it adopts a contrastive perspective (Swedish-English-French-German) with the twofold purpose of supporting its findings as to the linguistic nature of the Swedish med-phrase and of looking into the existence of identical or similar constructions in the compared languages.
