(From the beginning of the article) Slavic linguists have always recognized the fundamentally symbolic nature of language and hence the fact that diverse formal aspects of language exist for the purpose of conveying meaning. One striking illustration of the close affinities between cognitive linguistics and ideas formulated within traditional Slavic linguistics comes from the relatively early days of modern linguistic research on Slavic languages. In a study devoted to the nature of the contrast between the perfective and the imperfective aspect in Polish, a German Slavicist, Erwin Koschmieder (1934), proposed two conceptualizations of time which could easily be paraphrased as involving either the MOVING TIME metaphor for the perfective or the MOVING EGO metaphor for the imperfective. Other examples abound. Traditional analyses of Polish case by Kempf (1978), Klemensiewicz (1926) and Szober (1923 [1963]) aimed to provide a full-fledged semantic analysis of Polish case. This type of work with its emphasis on psychologically realistic explanations, has always been "a characteristic feature of Polish (Slavic?) linguistics" (Tabakowska 2001:12; translation AK). (Dagmar Divjak, Laura Janda and Agata Kochanska)