34 MARIJA MAYA BRALA further specified in Bowerman and Choi (2001, pp. 484-487). In these studies the authors undertake a crosslinguistic analysis of prepositional usage in 33 natural languages, and show that all the instances of spatial relations that are lexicalized in various languages can be categorized along a continuum that can systematically be mapped onto language, no matter which language one chooses. Departing from this striking conclusion, in this paper I try to locate the level at which language specificity occurs, and see whether, and if so then how can this specificity be integrated with the idea of a universal, cognitively based human language system. Let us begin by taking a summary look at prepositional semantics in general, ie see whether it is possible to pin down the core meaning of prepositions and offer a prepositional ‘semantic model’for the word class as such.