The Croatian preposition uz: A cognitive approach

Abstract: This article examines the semantics of the Croatian preposition uz. Its main aim is to establish a coherent semantic network of this preposition, an effort that implies elaborating how the preposition’s spatial meanings of immediate proximity and upward motion are related to each other, and how these meanings are related to the meanings in non-spatial domains. The theo-retical framework is cognitive linguistics and approaches to constructions that are compatible with cognitive approaches. The analysis follows a usage-based model of language description: therefore, the classification and interpretation of examples, as well as conclusions about rela-tions of different meanings, are based on the corpus of Croatian texts Hrvatska jezična riznica available online.