According to conceptual metaphor theory, conceptual metaphors are grounded in the nature of our everyday interaction with the world, either directly as in the case of primary metaphors or indirectly as in the case of compound metaphors. In other words they have an experiential basis. To illustrate, consider the following examples:

1. The price of shares is going up 2. She got a high score in her exam These utterances provide linguistic evidence for the metaphor quantity is vertical elevation (also known as more is up): there is a conventional reading related to quantity. In (1) the sentence refers to an increase in share prices. In (2) it refers to an exam result that represents a numerical quantity. Although each of these readings is perfectly conventional, the lexical items that provide these readings, going up and high, refer literally to the concept of vertical elevation.

According to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, the architects of conceptual metaphor theory, quantity and vertical elevation are often correlated, and these correlations are ubiquitous in our everyday experience.

For instance, when we increase the height of something there is typically more of it. If water is poured into a glass this results in a corresponding increase in both height (vertical elevation) and quantity of water. According to Lakoff and Johnson, this kind of correlation, experienced in our everyday lives, gives rise to the formation of an association at the conceptual level, which is reflected in the linguistic examples.

According to this view, conceptual metaphors are always at least partially motivated by and grounded in experience.