In this study, the use of most frequent spatial prepositions in English, Polish, Swedish, and Russian is analyzed. The prepositions and their contexts are extracted from corpora by means of concordance tools. The collostructional strength between the prepositions and the most frequent nouns in the PPs (Gries et al. 2005) is then computed in order to get a more detailed picture of the contexts in which a given preposition is most likely to appear. The results of the investigation are then analysed within the framework of cognitive semantics, especially Croft and Cruse's (2004) taxonomy of construal operations, and Talmy’s (2005) classification of spatial images