This work argues that English phrasal verbs, far from being arbitrary idioms, follow a systematic spatial logic grounded in embodied cognition. Drawing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory and image schemas (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Talmy 1988), it treats post-verbal particles (up, down, in, out, over…) as geometric operators projected from a base Physical Axis onto abstract domains —aspectual, psychological, power, discourse and relation—, analogously to Latin prefixation. After tracing the phenomenon's historical genesis (the OV→VO shift, the decline of Germanic prefixation, the dual Germanic/Romance lexicon), it systematises a taxonomic matrix of twelve particles and some 150 verbs across four dimensions. Two contributions go beyond standard cognitive description: a model-theoretic formal core —a schema-faithful projection morphism and a Transport Theorem yielding falsifiable lexical-gap predictions, plus a product regime accounting for free particle order and its duality with the serial (Quechua) regime— and an exploratory computational corpus-linguistics appendix: a zero-shot NLI probe over a COCA sample (N ≈ 9,627), with baseline calibration, bootstrap intervals, attenuation correction, a three-way discriminant control and a discourse transition-matrix analysis. The particles' motivation is systematic but not fully predictive, and the four dimensions behave as near-orthogonal —co-activable but uncorrelated—. The empirical validation is offered as a proof of concept, pending a full-COCA run and inter-annotator arbitration.