Substantive phrases with the incongruous attribute in the instrumental case with preposition nad(a)

Sažetak: The article discusses prepositional-case structures with a nominal head that have an adjunct in the instrumental case with the preposition nad(a). The fundamental purpose of this paper is to point to the semantic types of the structures in question and try to explain the ways of semantic transposition the spatial preposition nad(a) in more complex semantic domains. The notions of space are transformed into abstract concepts by means of metaphoric copying – into the concepts of “domination“, of cause, and of comparison. As a consequence, the noun phrases in question are furnished with the spatial meaning of “domination“, as well as with causative and comparative meaning. The position of the head is occupied by concrete nouns owing to the sentence condensation, or by verbal nouns arising through the processes of nominalization of verbal structures.