"Metaphors We live By"

George Lakoff
Mark Johnson
                            Univ. of Chicago Press (Chicago), 1980.

"We conceptualize the world using metaphor, so commonly, automatically, and unconsciously that we're not aware of it. As a result, we think metaphorically a large part of the time, and act in our everyday lives on the basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world. Over the past fifteen years, its been discovered that we share a fixed, conventional system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of "metaphorical mappings," each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another, typically more concrete, domain."  

"Our brains are built for metaphorical thought. Since we've evolved with "high-level" cortical areas taking input from "lower level" perceptual and motor areas, it should be no surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract reason. Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential mechanisms. Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity for metaphorical thinking."
G. Lakoff


I.e., the basic words in the mind are those that structure bodily properties, experiences, actions,
and events.

Some examples:

container
inside, outside, boundary

garden path
beginning and end, process, goal, time and space, their interrelationship

force
exertion, resistance, strengh, fatigue,etc.