One of the guiding principles of cognitive semantics and at the heart of much research in cognitive linguistics.

This thesis holds that the human mind and conceptual organisation are a function of the way in which our species-specific bodies interact with the environment we inhabit. In other words, the nature of concepts and the way they are structured and organised is constrained by the nature of our embodied experience.

As cognitive linguists hold that language reflects conceptual structure, then it follows that language reflects embodied experience. Scholars who have championed versions of the thesis of embodied cognition include George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their work on metaphor and the image schema, Ronald Langacker in his development of cognitive grammar and Leonard Talmy in his investigations on how language encodes conceptual structure