ASPECTS OF ATTENTION IN LANGUAGE

This chapter introduces new work on the fundamental attentional system of language (Talmy, forthcoming), while in part providing a framework in which prior linguistic work on attention can be placed. In a speech situation, a hearer may attend to the linguistic expression produced by a speaker, to the conceptual content represented by that expression, and to the context at hand. But not all of this material appears uniformly in the foreground of the hearer’s attention. Rather, various portions or aspects of the expression, content, and context have differing degrees of salience. Such differences are only partially due to any intrinsically greater interest of certain elements over others. More fundamentally, language has an extensive system that assigns different degrees of salience to the parts of an expression or of its reference or of the context. In terms of the speech participants, the speaker employs this system in formulating an expression; the hearer, largely on the basis of such formulations, allocates his or her attention in a particular way over the material of these domains.