Suppose that they come closest to representing what everyone uses language for. I have come to believe that, while there is room for improvement, case tag patterns in some ways embody a particular theory of linguistics. I am not a linguist by training, so I can't give you lots of references. It's more specific to the topic of this article, but perhaps is not as readable as Lakoff's book. The key idea for our purposes is that the foundation of all linguistic reasoning is the image schema .
All human beings have the same gestalt impressions about the world.
These fundamental impressions which we all share are then used as the building blocks for all of the more abstract concepts. The building of new concepts is not a rigorous process. It frequently relies on approximations like metonymy and metaphor. Derived concepts in different languages seem to organize reality in different ways. While reading Lakoff's book, I saw many examples, not of individual case tags, but of case tag groups, buried within the image schemata.