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Human beings’ perception, experience, and conceptualizations are mediated and constrained by human bodies: this is what is meant by “embodiment” and “embodied cognition”. Embodied experience gives shape to conceptual structure: the world, as sensed by organs of perception, constitutes the basis of conceptual structure, that is, of human thoughts and concepts (cf. among many others, Lakoff 1987; Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Langacker 1987; Svorou 1994). Furthermore, if embodied experience shapes our conceptual structure, it must also constitute the foundation of meaning, that is, of concepts expressed by means of human language. This implies that meaning must be mediated through human perception: all concepts, both concrete and abstract, are grounded in terms of spatio-physical experience.

Therefore, in Cognitive Grammar, space is regarded as one of the basic domains of human cognition, as it does not seem to be understood through other cognitive domains, and provides the basis for understanding other more abstract domains (Lakoff & Johnson 1980). More generally, any set of concepts that cannot be described by means of another set of concepts can be regarded as a basic domain. By contrast, any domain that needs at least one other domain to be conceptualized is abstract (Croft 1993).

Linguistic forms, which are humans’ means for expressing thoughts and concepts, are initially associated with a concrete and spatial meaning, which constitutes the starting point for developing more abstract meanings and functions. The mapping from a concrete to an abstract conceptual domain is possible thanks to the cognitive mechanisms of metonymy and metaphor. Importantly, several metonymic and metaphorical meanings are regularly associated with specific linguistic sources, and later on conventionalized (cf. Section 2.1.2). In conventionalized lexical items, it can become difficult to trace back to the original spatial meaning, or to understand the links between the developed abstract and the basic spatial meanings from a synchronic point of view (cf. Section 2.2.5 on lexicalization; Chapters 6 and 7 on Old Church Slavic and Old Irish preverbs for cases in point). Thus, a given linguistic form is usually polysemous: each of its meanings can rely on the basic or on the abstract domains that pertain to that linguistic form. All meanings of a linguistic form are organized around its basic meaning in what can be called “structured polysemy” (e.g. Tyler & Evans 2003): meanings directly or indirectly relate to the center or to each other in a motivated radial structure (e.g. Lakoff 1987).