Original scientific paper Received on 23.01. 2012 Accepted for publication on 20.03. 2012

The Croatian preposition uz: A cognitive approach 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 theoretical framework is cognitive lin-guistics and approaches to constructions that are compatible with cognitive ap-proaches. The analysis follows a usage-based model of language description: therefore, the classification and interpretation of examples, as well as conclusions about relations of different meanings, are based on the corpus of Croatian texts Hrvatska jezina riznica available online. Key words: spatial particles; prepositions; uz in Croatian; upward motion; prox-imity; elongation; extended duration. 1. Introduction1 The spatial particle uz(-) functions as both a preposition and a prefix in Croa