Since the advent of cognitive semantics (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, Lakoff 1987) language has been understood as an expression of body-based conceptual structures. The cognitive basis for our prepositions is composed of image schemas, including spatialperceptual particles such as up/down, forward/backward and left/right, serving as an anthropocentric reference frame for orientation. In their pioneering work, Brugman & Lakoff (1988) show the polysemy within the network of the English preposition over by inter-relating the different meanings of this preposition, also referring back to its image-schematic basic meaning which likewise represents the starting point for metaphorically motivated extensions of other meanings. With respect to the area of German as a Foreign Language (DaF) such studies are valuable since German prepositions, including the prefixes of separable and inseparable verbs, are schematically meaningful, as Bellavia (2007: 80-158), among others, demonstrates in a study about um and über. Nevertheless, as we will show in this article, these findings have not been taken into consideration by DaF-textbooks yet. We will therefore illustrate how German learners might be encouraged to reveal the cognitive motivation of linguistic expressions as well as the interconnectedness of foreign language vocabulary structure. We will also suggest some exercises based on authentic language use which show how results from corpus linguistics might be operationalized for foreign language teaching contexts.