Central and East Europeans have a great deal in common, both historically and culturally, with West Europeans and North Americans, but tend to be more interdependent. Interdependence has been shown to be linked to holistic cognition. East Asians are more interdependent than Americans and are more holistic. If interdependence causes holism, we would expect Central and East Europeans to be more holistic than West Europeans and North Americans. In two studies we found evidence that Central and East Europeans are indeed more holistic than Westerners on three tasks, one of which examined categorization and two of which measured patterns of visual attention. Th ese studies support the argument that cross-cultural diff erences in cognition are due to society level diff erences in independence/interdependence. Culture fundamentally infl uences the way we view the world. Over the past two decades psychologists have found that many of their discoveries about human cognition were not universally applicable, but rather a description of a way of perceiving and thinking about the world specifi c to Western societies. One of the major dimensions of cultural diff erence, and one of the most studied, is social orientation. People in Western societies tend to be more independent, focusing on personal goals and achievement, and valuing self-effi cacy.

This paper deals with the noun-preposition [N PP] construction in Croatian and compares the construction to its counterparts in English and French. Noun – preposition relations are analyzed as grammatical relations which participate in the formation of the lexicon, i.e. as grammatical devices which are productively used as lexicalization patterns. Based on the corpus analysis, [N PP] constructions in Croatian are identified and contrasted to English and French data. Lexical status of multi-word units in Croatian is discussed, as well as the level of idiomaticity of these constructions as compared to English and French. Whereas French and Croatian employ a similar lexicalization pattern, English uses compounding. The lexicon – grammar continuum is thus observed from the perspective of syntactic structures participating in word-formation.

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The use of Kantian schemata as valuable theoretical elements (constructs) in the explication of our cognitive architecture has been for some time a recurring topic in the philosophy of mind. The relevancy of schemas and processes of schematization as organizing principles of language structures has been repeatedly pointed out in linguistic theory, especially within the framework of cognitive linguistics. In this paper we discuss how Kant's notion of the schematization of the mind, as discussed in his Critique of Pure Reason, i.e. the central notion of the schema, provides us with relevant insights into a novel critical approach to schematization in linguistics. At the same time, we strive to show that linguistic analyses provide a corroboration and enrichment of Kant's theoretical philosophy by means of linguistic data, reinforcing Kant's position with linguistic arguments and thus making him relevant in contemporary linguistic discussions.