A term employed in cognitive grammar. Refers to a concept that has a direct experiential basis but which constitutes an abstraction representing commonalities over ubiquitous everyday experiences. Conceptual archetypes include concepts such as the following: the human body, the human face, a discrete physical object, an object moving through space, the use of one instrument to affect another, one person giving an object to a recipient and so on. Conceptual archetypes form the basis for the category prototype of grammatical notions of various kinds. For instance, while the grammatical subject is characterised as the clause-level trajector in a profiled relationship, the conceptual archetype of agent defines the category prototype.