Implict negations and direction-reversing The present article concentrates on the study of the phenomena of directionreversing and role exchange in syntagms like eltitkol valami+t valaki+től [conceal something+ACC somebody+ABL] 'to conceal something from someone', megtisztítja a cipő+t a sár+tól [clean the shoe+ACC the mud+ABL] 'to clean one's shoes of the mud' (literaIly 'from'). Applying the methods of cognitive linguistics, 1 seek to identify the factors that could lead to (1) the inversion of the direction of an action or event, or to (2) the exchanging of roles between the components of a possessive relation. It emerges that in this case the semantics of the verb, the concepts of usefulness and danger, and implicit denial, as weil as the preperception and the force dynamics of the situation, play an important role.