In: Diego Ardoino and Adriano Cerri (eds). 2021. Intersezioni baltistiche. Studi e saggi. (Baltica Pisana Series). Novi Ligure: Joker. 55–83. On the semantic motivation of some verbal prefixes in Lithuanian Inesa Šeškauskienė 1. Introduction. Previous research Lithuanian is known for its rich derivational and grammatical morphology. Its investigation, especially from the semantic point of view, is aggravated by the fact that almost all morphemes have more than one meaning, or are polysemous. For example, the prefix par- attached to the verb duoti ‘give’ renders the meaning of selling; when attached to the verb nešti ‘carry’ the prefix contributes to expressing the meaning of bringing or carrying something home. Polysemy has been a problematic issue for many linguistic schools; some, like generative grammar, refused to tackle it altogether (for an overview see, for example, Raven, Leacock 2000; Geeraerts 2001, among others). The cognitive approach, foregrounding human cognition in the study of meaning, takes a rather different perspective (see Evans, Green 2006; Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk 2007, etc.). Placing language among other cognition-related disciplines and meaning at the core of the study, the cognitive approach regards polysemy as “a reflection of interrelated operation of language, meaning, and cognition” (Shibuya 2007: 658). It is therefore understandable why in the cognitive linguistic framework, differently from structural linguistics, the dichotomy between polysemy and homonymy is not even posed as such. Rather, they are treated as the end-points of a continuum (Murphy 2010: 98–104). Moreover, cognitivists tend to adhere to the polysemy rather than homonymy, in other words, senses of an item (morpheme, word, phrase, etc.) are related, or motivated, rather than idiosyncratic. Some cognitively-oriented researchers claim that each sense of a polysemous item (morpheme, word, phrase, etc.) requires its own representation. Others adhere to the core, or monosemy, view holding that multiple senses are derived from the core, or a single semantic representation (Murphy 2010: 101–104). Whichever approach is favoured, cognitivists search for systemic semantic relations, often demonstrated as semantic networks, reflecting a range of