Analysing English prepositions means a painful labour. Among reasons responsible for this state of affairs I would enumerate the fact that, as the findings about prepositions published within the Collins COBUILD series (1991-1997) show, ten prepositions: 'at', 'by', 'for', 'from', 'in+into', 'of', 'on', 'to', and 'with' realize more than two hundred meanings. Strikingly, the most modest forms seem to be the richest as regards the number of meanings each of them expresses. In the majority of works on prepositions spatial aspect of their meanings is considered to be the most representative. For example, Dirven (1993: 73-97) begins with characterizing "spatial conceptualisations" of twelve prepositions and sets of various relationships that obtain among them. Next, he establishes "chains of meaning from physical into mental space,' from spatial domains via the domain of time to the more abstract ones such as: state, topic or area, manner / means, circumstance and cause / reason. Concluding, Dirven points to "the relationship between the way physical space is divided up in English and the way mental space is structured." In other words, the author's position is that the "basis of it all is the conceptualisation of physical space." Dirven's position can be regarded as typical of cognitive analyses of prepositions in that it follows the pattern in which the first step is to characterize the type of organization in three-dimensional space the preposition in focus encodes, and then proceed to metaphorical extensions of the structures into abstract domains. My standpoint discussed at length in Turewicz (2000) is that the spatial basis of prepositions is crucial to the evolution leading to the formation of meaning schemata of prepositions (indeed, each of the predicates), whereas "spatiality" need not retain the central position in the meaning structure of the schema which sanctions specific meanings (of a preposition). In the present article I follow the "non-spatial" approach to the analysis of the preposition 'in'. (Kamila Turewicz)