The area of study known as cognitive semantics is concerned with investigating the relationship between experience, the conceptual system and the semantic structure encoded by language. In specific terms, scholars working in cognitive semantics investigate conceptual structure (knowledge representation) and conceptualization (meaning construction).

Cognitive semanticists have employed language as the lens through which these cognitive phenomena can be investigated. Consequently, research in cognitive semantics tends to be interested in modeling the human mind as much as it is concerned with investigating linguistic semantics.

Like the larger enterprise of cognitive linguistics of which it forms a subset, cognitive semantics represents an approach rather than a single articulated theory.

There are four guiding principles of cognitive semantics that characterize the approach. Some examples of theories in cognitive semantics include blending theory, Conceptual Metaphor theory, frame semantics, mental spaces theory, LCCM theory, principled polysemy and approaches to linguistic semantics such as cognitive lexical semantics and encyclopaedic semantics.