In Klaus-Uwe Panther and Gu¨nter Radden, eds., Metonymy in language and thought 309–32.. In Klaus-Uwe Panther and Gu¨nter Radden, eds., Metonymy in language and thought 61–76.. In Klaus-
Trang 1Burkhardt, Armin 1996 Zwischen Poesie und O ¨ konomie: Die Metonymie als se-mantisches Prinzip Zeitschrift fu¨r Germanistische Linguistik 24: 175–94.
Copestake, Ann, and Ted Briscoe 1995 Semi-productive polysemy and sense extension Journal of Semantics 12: 15–67.
Croft, William 1993 The role of domains in the interpretation of metaphors and me-tonymies Cognitive Linguistics 4: 335–70.
Croft, William 2001 Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological per-spective Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cruse, D Alan 2000 Meaning in language: An introduction to semantics and pragmatics Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dirven, Rene´ 1993 Metonymy and metaphor: Different mental strategies of con-ceptualisation Leuvense Bijdragen 82: 1–28.
Dirven, Rene´, and Ralf Po¨rings, eds 2002 Metaphor and metonymy in comparison and contrast Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Dubois, Jacques, Francis Edeline, Jean-Marie Klinkenberg, Philippe Minguet, Franc¸ois Pire, and Madelin Trinon 1970 Rhe´torique ge´ne´rale Paris: Larousse.
Fauconnier, Gilles 1985 Mental spaces: Aspects of meaning construction in natural lan-guage Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Feyaerts, Kurt 1999 Metonymic hierarchies: The conceptualization of stupidity in German idiomatic expressions In Klaus-Uwe Panther and Gu¨nter Radden, eds., Metonymy
in language and thought 309–32 Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Feyaerts, Kurt 2000 Refining the inheritance hypothesis: Interaction between metaphoric and metonymic hierarchies In Antonio Barcelona, ed., Metaphor and metonymy at the crossroads: A cognitive perspective 59–78 Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Geeraerts, Dirk 1988 Cognitive grammar and the history of lexical semantics In Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn, ed., Topics in cognitive linguistics 647–77 Amsterdam: John Benjamins Geeraerts, Dirk 1994 Metonymy In R E Asher, ed., The encyclopedia of language and linguistics 5: 2477–78 Oxford: Pergamon.
Geeraerts, Dirk 2002 The interaction of metaphor and metonymy in composite expres-sions In Rene´ Dirven and Ralf Po¨rings, eds., Metaphor and metonymy in comparison and contrast 435–65 Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr 1994 The poetics of mind: Figurative thought, language, and un-derstanding Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr 1999 Speaking and thinking with metonymy In Klaus-Uwe Panther and Gu¨nter Radden, eds., Metonymy in language and thought 61–76 Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Goldberg, Adele E 1995 Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Goossens, Louis 1990 Metaphtonymy: The interaction of metaphor and metonymy in expressions for linguistic actions Cognitive Linguistics 1: 323–40.
Goossens, Louis 1999 Metonymic bridges in modal shifts In Klaus-Uwe Panther and Gu¨nter Radden, eds., Metonymy in language and thought 193–210 Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Goossens, Louis 2000 Patterns of meaning extension, ‘‘parallel chaining,’’ subjectification, and modal shifts In Antonio Barcelona, ed., Metaphor and metonymy at the crossroads:
A cognitive perspective 149–69 Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Goossens, Louis 2002 Metaphtonymy: The interaction of metaphor and metonymy in expressions for linguistic action In Rene´ Dirven and Ralf Po¨rings, eds., Metaphor and metonymy in comparison and contrast 349–77 Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Trang 2Grady, Joseph 1997 Foundations of meaning: Primary metaphors and primary scenes PhD dissertation, University of California at Berkeley.
Grady, Joseph, and Christopher Johnson 2002 Converging evidence for the notions of subscene and primary scene In Rene´ Dirven and Ralf Po¨rings, eds., Metaphor and metonymy in comparison and contrast 533–54 Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Grice, H Paul 1975 Logic and conversation In Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan, eds., Syntax and semantics, vol 3, Speech acts 41–58 New York: Academic Press.
Heine, Bernd, Ulrike Claudi, and Friederike Hu¨nnemeyer 1991 Grammaticalization: A conceptual framework Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hopper, Paul J., and Elizabeth Closs Traugott 1993 Grammaticalization Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2nd ed., 2003)
Jakobson, Roman [1956] 1971 Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic distur-bances In Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, eds., Fundamentals of language 67–96 The Hague: Mouton.
Kleiber, Georges 1995 Polyse´mie, transferts de sens et me´tonymie inte´gre´e Folia Lin-guistica 29: 105–32.
Koch, Peter 1999 Frame and contiguity: On the cognitive bases of metonymy and certain types of word formation In Klaus-Uwe Panther and Gu¨nter Radden, eds., Metonymy
in language and thought 139–67 Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ko¨vecses, Zolta´n 1986 Metaphors of anger, pride and love: A lexical approach to the study
of concepts Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ko¨vecses, Zolta´n 1995 Anger: Its language, conceptualisation, and physiology in the light
of cross-cultural evidence In John R Taylor and Robert E MacLaury, eds., Lan-guage and the cognitive construal of the world 181–96 Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter Lakoff, George 1987 Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson 1980 Metaphors we live by Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson 1999 Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought New York: Basic Books.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner 1989 More than cool reason: A field guide to poetic metaphor Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Langacker, Ronald W 1987 Foundations of cognitive grammar Vol 1, Theoretical pre-requisites Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Langacker, Ronald W 1993 Reference-point constructions Cognitive Linguistics 4: 1–38 Langacker, Ronald W 2000 Grammar and conceptualization Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter Levinson, Stephen C 2000 Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Nerlich, Brigitte, David D Clarke, and Zazie Todd 1999 ‘‘Mummy, I like being a sand-wich’’: Metonymy in language acquisition In Klaus-Uwe Panther and Gu¨nter Radden, eds., Metonymy in language and thought 362–83 Amsterdam: John Benjamins Niemeier, Susanne 2000 Straight from the heart—metonymic and metaphorical explo-rations In Antonio Barcelona, ed., Metaphor and metonymy at the crossroads: A cog-nitive perspective 195–213 Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Nikiforidou, Kiki 1999 Nominalizations, metonymy, and lexicographic practice In Leon
G Stadler and Christoph Eyrich, eds., Issues in cognitive linguistics 141–63 Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Norrick, Neal R 1981 Semiotic principles in semantic theory Amsterdam: John Benjamins Nunberg, Geoffrey 1978 The pragmatics of reference Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Trang 3Nunberg, Geoffrey 1995 Transfers of meaning Journal of Semantics 17: 109–32.
Panther, Klaus-Uwe 2001 Syntactic control In Neil J Smelser and Paul B Baltes, eds., International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences 15397–401 New York: Elsevier.
Panther, Klaus-Uwe, and Gu¨nter Radden 1999a Introduction In Klaus-Uwe Panther and Gu¨nter Radden, eds., Metonymy in language and thought 1–14 Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Panther, Klaus-Uwe, and Gu¨nter Radden, eds 1999b Metonymy in language and thought Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Panther, Klaus-Uwe, and Linda Thornburg 1998 A cognitive approach to inferencing
in conversation Journal of Pragmatics 30: 755–69.
Panther, Klaus-Uwe, and Linda Thornburg 1999 The potentiality for actuality metonymy in English and Hungarian In Klaus-Uwe Panther and Gu¨nter Radden, eds., Metonymy in language and thought 333–57 Amsterdam: John Benjamins Panther, Klaus-Uwe, and Linda Thornburg 2000 The effect for cause metonymy in English grammar In Antonio Barcelona, ed., Metaphor and metonymy at the cross-roads: A cognitive perspective 215–31 Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Panther, Klaus-Uwe, and Linda Thornburg 2002 The roles of metaphor and metonymy in English -er nominals In Rene´ Dirven and Ralf Po¨rings, eds., Metaphor and metonymy
in comparison and contrast 279–319 Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Panther, Klaus-Uwe, and Linda Thornburg 2003a Introduction: On the nature of con-ceptual metonymy In Klaus-Uwe Panther and Linda Thornburg, eds., Metonymy and pragmatic inferencing 1–20 Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Panther, Klaus-Uwe, and Linda Thornburg 2003b Metonymy and lexical aspect in English and French Jezikoslovlje 4: 71–101.
Panther, Klaus-Uwe, and Linda Thornburg, eds 2003c Metonymy and pragmatic in-ferencing Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Papafragou, Anna 1996 Figurative language and the semantics-pragmatics distinction Language and Literature 5: 179–93.
Paul, Hermann [1880] 1975 Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte Tu¨bingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Pe´rez Herna´ndez, Lorena, and Francisco Jose´ Ruiz de Mendoza 2002 Grounding, se-mantic motivation, and conceptual interaction in indirect directive speech acts Journal of Pragmatics 34: 259–84.
Pustejovsky, James 1991 The generative lexicon Computational Linguistics 17: 409–41 Pustejovsky, James 1993 Type coercion and lexical selection In James Pustejovsky, ed., Semantics and the lexicon 73–96 Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer.
Radden, Gu¨nter 2000 How metonymic are metaphors? In Antonio Barcelona, ed., Met-aphor and metonymy at the crossroads: A cognitive perspective 93–108 Berlin: Mouton
de Gruyter.
Radden, Gu¨nter 2002 How metonymic are metaphors? In Rene´ Dirven and Ralf Po¨rings, eds., Metaphor and metonymy in comparison and contrast 407–34 Berlin: Mouton
de Gruyter.
Radden, Gu¨nter, and Zolta´n Ko¨vecses 1999 Towards a theory of metonymy In Klaus-Uwe Panther and Gu¨nter Radden, eds., Metonymy in language and thought 17–59 Am-sterdam: John Benjamins.
Riemer, Nick 2002 When is a metonymy no longer a metonymy? In Rene´ Dirven and Ralf Po¨rings, eds., Metaphor and metonymy in comparison and contrast 379–406 Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Trang 4Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez, Francisco Jose´ 2000 The role of mappings and domains in understanding metonymy In Antonio Barcelona, ed., Metaphor and metonymy
at the crossroads: A cognitive perspective 109–32 Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez, Francisco Jose´, and Jose´ Luis Otal Campo 2002 Metonymy, grammar, and communication Albolote, Granada: Editorial Comares.
Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez, Francisco Jose´, and Olga Isabel Dı´ez Velasco 2002 Patterns
of conceptual interaction In Rene´ Dirven and Ralf Po¨rings, eds., Metaphor and me-tonymy in comparison and contrast 489–532 Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez, Francisco Jose´, and Olga Isabel Dı´ez Velasco 2004 Metonymic motivation in anaphoric reference In Gu¨nter Radden and Klaus-Uwe Panther, eds., Studies in linguistic motivation 293–320 Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez, Francisco Jose´, and Lorena Pe´rez Herna´ndez 2001 Metonymy and grammar: Motivation, constraints and interactions Language & Communication 21: 321–57.
Ruiz de Mendoza Iba´n˜ez, Francisco Jose´, and Lorena Pe´rez Herna´ndez 2003 Cognitive operations and pragmatic implication In Klaus-Uwe Panther and Linda Thornburg, eds., Metonymy and pragmatic inferencing 23–49 Amsterdam: John Benjamins Ruwet, Nicolas 1975 Synecdoques et me´tonymies Poe´tique 6: 371–88.
Schofer, Peter, and Donald Rice 1977 Metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche revis(it)ed Semiotica 21: 121–47.
Searle, John 1969 Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press.
Searle, John 1975 Indirect speech acts In Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan, eds., Speech acts 59–82 New York: Academic Press.
Seto, Ken-ichi 1999 Distinguishing metonymy from synecdoche In Klaus-Uwe Panther and Gu¨nter Radden, eds., Metonymy in language and thought 91–120 Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Song, Nam Sun 1997 Metaphor and metonymy In Robyn Carston and Seiji Uchida, eds., Relevance Theory: Applications and implications 87–104 Amsterdam: John Benjamins Stirling, Lesley 1996 Metonymy and anaphora In Belgian Journal of Linguistics 10: 69–88 Sweetser, Eve 1991 From etymology to pragmatics: Metaphorical and cultural aspects of semantic structure Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Talmy, Leonard 2000 Toward a cognitive semantics Vol 2, Typology and process in concept structuring Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Thornburg, Linda, and Klaus Panther 1997 Speech act metonymies In Wolf-Andreas Liebert, Gisela Redeker, and Linda Waugh, eds., Discourse and perspectives in cognitive linguistics 201–19 Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, and Ekkehard Ko¨nig 1991 The semantics-pragmatics of grammaticalization revisited In Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Bernd Heine, eds., Approaches to grammaticalization 1: 189–218 Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ullmann, Stephen 1951 The principles of semantics Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Ullmann, Stephen 1962 Semantics: An introduction to the science of meaning Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
van Eemeren, Frans H., Rob Grootendorst, Ralph H Johnson, Christian Plantin, Charles
A Willard, David Zarefsky, J Anthony Blair, A Francisca Snoeck Henkemans, Erik Krabbe, John H Woods, and Douglas Walton 1996 Fundamental argumentation theory: A handbook of historical backgrounds and contemporary developments Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Trang 5A T T E N T I O N
P H E N O M E N A
l e o n a r d t a l m y
1 I n t r o d u c t i o n
1.1 Content of the Study
This chapter introduces new work on the fundamental attentional system of lan-guage (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 at-tend 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 ma-terial 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 (see also Schmid, this volume, chapter 5) Such differences are only par-tially 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 expres-sion; the hearer, largely on the basis of such formulations, allocates his or her at-tention in a particular way over the material of these domains
This attentional system in language includes a large number of basic factors, the ‘‘building blocks’’ of the system, with over fifty identified to date Each factor involves a particular linguistic mechanism that increases or decreases attention on
a certain type of linguistic entity The mechanisms employed fall into some ten categories, most with subcategories The type of linguistic entity whose degree of
Trang 6salience is determined by the factors is usually the semantic referent of a constituent, but other types occur, including the phonological shape of a constituent or the vocal delivery of the utterance Each factor contrasts a linguistic circumstance in which attention is increased with a complementary circumstance in which it is decreased
A speaker can use a factor for either purpose—or in some cases for both at the same time For some factors, increased attention on a linguistic entity is regularly accompanied by additional cognitive effects, such as distinctness, clarity, and sig-nificance, while decreased attention correlates with such converse effects as meldedness, vagueness, and ordinariness The bulk of this chapter, section 2, pres-ents in highly excerpted form some of the attentional factors in their taxonomy Although able to act alone, the basic factors also regularly combine and interact—whether in a single constituent, over a sentence, or through a discourse—
to produce further attentional effects Several such factor patterns are presented in abbreviated form in section 3
Many further aspects of language’s attentional system cannot be examined in this short chapter, but a few can be touched on here to give a fuller sense of the system First, language-specific and typological differences occur in the use of attentional devices For a language-specific example, some individual languages (like Tamil) mani-fest factor Ca1 (see section 2.3) by using special morphemes to mark an adjacent constituent for foregrounding as topic or focus Other languages (like English) do not use this mechanism at all For a typological example, sign languages (see Talmy 2003b) appear to differ systematically from spoken languages in the use of a special mechanism for attentional disregard To illustrate with American Sign Language (ASL), consider that I want to sign that a particular wall was architecturally moved farther out to enlarge a room To represent the wall in its initial position, I begin the sign by holding my hands horizontally before me joined at the fingertips, with the flattened hands oriented vertically, palms toward myself If the wall was physically moved along the floor while still standing, I would then move my hands horizontally away from myself with a steady deliberative movement But the wall may instead have been removed and set up again at the more distant position In that case, I now move my hands through a quick up-and-down arc, in effect showing them ‘‘jump’’ into the new more distant position This quick arc-gesture signals that one is to dis-regard the spatial path that the hands are seen to follow and to take into consideration only the initial and final hand positions Thus, this gesture can be regarded as a linguistic form with the function of calling for reduced attention to—in fact, for the disregard of—the path of the hands, which would otherwise be understood as a semantically relevant constituent In addition to individual mechanisms of this last type, signed languages also have unique factor combinations In ASL, for example, the nondominant hand can sign a specific topic and then be held fixed in position throughout the remainder of the clause as the dominant hand signs the comment (see Liddell 2003) That is, the nondominant hand maintains some of the viewer’s background attention on the identity of the topic, even as the dominant hand at-tracts the viewer’s attentional foreground to certain particulars of content No ob-vious counterparts of these attentional devices occur in spoken languages
Trang 7Next, in the developing theoretical account of the attention system in language, some broad properties are already evident For example, in terms of the qualities of attention per se, linguistic attention functions as a gradient, not as a dichotomous all-or-none phenomenon The particular level of attention on a linguistic entity is set
in terms of foregrounding or backgrounding relative to a baseline for the entity, rather than absolutely on a zero-based scale And the linguistic aspects realized in the course of a discourse range along a gradient of ‘‘access to attention,’’ from ones with
‘‘interruptive’’ capacity, able to supplant whatever else is currently highest in atten-tion, to ones that basically remain unconscious Further, in terms of attentional or-ganization, a number of the factors and their combinations accord with—perhaps fall out of—certain more general principles By one such principle, attention tends to be more on the reference of some linguistic material—that is, on its semantic content— than on the form or structure of the material And by a related principle, attention tends to be more on higher-level units of such content than on lower-level units For example, attention is characteristically more on the overall literal meaning of a sen-tence than on the meanings of its individual words, and still more on the contextual import of that sentence’s meaning than on the literal meaning of the sentence Finally, the attentional properties found in language appear to have both com-monalities and differences with attentional properties in other cognitive systems An example of commonality is that greater magnitude along a cognitive parameter tends
to attract greater attention to the entity manifesting it This is seen both in language, say, for stronger stress on a linguistic constituent, and in visual perception, say, for large size or bright color of a viewed object On the other hand, one mechanism in the attentional system of language is the use of special morphemes—for example, topic and focus markers—dedicated to the task of directing attention to the referent of an adjacent constituent But the perceptual modalities appear to have little that is com-parable Contrariwise, abrupt change along any sensory parameter is one of the main mechanisms in the perceptual modalities for attracting attention to the stimulus exhibiting it But it has a minimal role in the attentional system of language Thus, the larger study, which this chapter only introduces, covers the linguistic system of attentional factors and their patterns of interaction, a theoretical frame-work that includes the universal and typological aspects of this system, the general principles that the system is based on, and a comparison between this linguistic attentional system and that of other cognitive modalities
1.2 Context of the Study
Much previous linguistic work has involved the issue of attention or salience Areas within such work are familiar under terms like topic and focus (e.g., Lambrecht 1994), focal attention (e.g., Tomlin 1995), activation (e.g., Givo´n 1990; Chafe 1994), proto-type theory (e.g., Lakoff 1987), frame semantics (e.g., Fillmore 1976, 1982), profiling (e.g., Langacker 1987), and deictic center (e.g., Zubin and Hewitt 1995) My research
on attention has included: the relative salience of the ‘‘Figure’’ and the ‘‘Ground’’ in
Trang 8a represented situation (Talmy 1972, 1978a, 2000a: chapter 5); the ‘‘windowing’’ of attention on one or more selected portions of a represented scene, with attentional backgrounding of the ‘‘gapped’’ portions (Talmy 1976, 1983, 1995b, 1996b, 2000a: chapter 4); the attentional backgrounding versus foregrounding of concepts when expressed by closed-class (grammatical) forms versus by open-class (lexical) forms (Talmy 1978c, 1988b, 2000a: chapter 1); the ‘‘level’’ of attention set either on the whole
of a scene or on its componential makeup (Talmy 1988b, 2000a: chapter 1); the differential attention on the ‘‘Agonist’’ and the ‘‘Antagonist,’’ the two entities in a force-dynamic opposition (Talmy 1988a, 2000a: chapter 7); ‘‘fictive motion,’’ in which a hearer is linguistically directed to sweep his or her focus of attention over the contours of a static scene (Talmy 1996a, 2000a: chapter 2); the backgrounding versus foregrounding of a concept when it is expressed in the verb complex versus by a nom-inal complement (Talmy 1985, 2000b: chapter 1); the backgrounding versus fore-grounding of a proposition when it is expressed by a subordinate clause versus by a main clause (Talmy 1978b, 1991, 2000a: chapter 6); the conscious as opposed to unconscious processes in the acquisition, manifestation, and imparting of cultural patterns (Talmy 1995a, 2000b: chapter 7); and attentional differences between spoken and signed language (Talmy 2003a, 2003b) However, the present study may be the first with the aim of developing a systematic framework within which to place all such prior findings—together with a number of new findings—about linguistic attention
In fact, this study is perhaps the first to recognize that the linguistic phenomena across this whole range do all pertain to the same single cognitive system of attention The theoretical orientation of this study is, of course, that of Cognitive Lin-guistics This linguistic approach is centered on the patterns in which and the pro-cesses by which conceptual content is organized in language Cognitive Linguistics addresses this linguistic structuring of conception not only with respect to basic physical categories like space and time, force and causation, but also with respect to cognitive categories—the ideational and affective categories ascribed to sentient agents These forms of conceptual structuring fall into several extensive classes, what I termed ‘‘schematic systems’’ (Talmy 2000a: chapter 1) One such system is that of ‘‘configurational structure,’’ which comprises the schematic structuring or geometric delineations in space or time (or other qualitative domains) that lin-guistic forms can specify (Talmy 2000a: chapters 1–3; 2000b: chapters 1–4) Another schematic system is ‘‘force dynamics,’’ which covers the structural representation
of two entities interacting energetically with respect to opposition to a force, re-sistance to opposition, and overcoming of rere-sistance, as well as to blockage, hin-drance, support, and causation (Talmy 2000a: chapters 7–8) And a third schematic system is that of ‘‘cognitive states and processes,’’ which includes the struc-tural representation of volition and intention, expectation and affect, and per-spective and attention (Talmy 2000a: chapters 1, 4, 5, 8) Thus, the present study of attention is an elaboration of one subportion within the extensive conceptual structuring system of language In turn, the properties that attention is found to have in language can be compared with those of attention as it operates in other cognitive systems, such as in the various perceptual modalities, in the affect system,
Trang 9in the reasoning/inferencing system, and in motor control This kind of compar-ative procedure was introduced in Talmy (2000a), designated as the ‘‘overlapping systems model of cognitive organization.’’ Accordingly, it is assumed that the findings on attention in language will enable corroborative investigation by the methods of other fields of cognitive science, including the experimental techniques
of psycholinguistics, the brain-imaging techniques of cognitive neuroscience, and the simulation techniques of artificial intelligence The present study can thus help
to develop a framework within which attentional findings from a range of research disciplines can be coordinated and ultimately integrated
2 S o m e L i n g u i s t i c F a c t o r s T h a t
S e t S t r e n g t h o f A t t e n t i o n
2.1 Factors Involving Properties of the Morpheme (A)
A morpheme is here quite generally understood to be any minimal linguistic form with an associated meaning This thus includes not only simplex morphemes, but also idioms and constructions (e.g., the English auxiliary-subject inversion meaning ‘if ’)
Formal Properties of the Morpheme (Aa)
Factor Aa1: Expression in One or Another Lexical Category
A concept tends to be more or less salient in accordance with the lexical category of the form representing the concept First, open-class categories in general lend more salience than closed-class categories Further, within open-class categories, nouns may tend to outrank verbs while, within closed-class categories, forms with pho-nological substance may tend to outrank forms lacking it Accordingly, lexical categories may exhibit something of the following salience hierarchy:
open-class (N > V) > closed-class (phonological > aphonological)
Only the open-class/closed-class contrast is illustrated here Consider a case where essentially the same concept can be represented both by a closed-class form and
by an open-class form Thus, English tense is typically represented for a verb in a finite clause by a closed-class form, either an inflection or a modal, as in (1a) with
an -ed for the past and (1b) with an -s or will for the future But a nominal in a prepositional phrase cannot indicate tense in that way If relative time is to be indicated here, one must resort to open-class forms, as in (2a), with the adjectives
Trang 10previous to mark the past and (2b) with upcoming to mark the future The concepts
of relative time seem much more salient when expressed by adjectives than by closed-class forms (see Talmy 2000a: chapter 1)
(1) a When he arrived,
b When he arrives/will arrive,
(2) a On his previous arrival,
b On his upcoming arrival,
Factor Aa2: Degree of Morphological Autonomy
The term ‘‘degree of morphological autonomy’’ here refers to the grammatical status
of a morpheme as free or bound A concept tends to receive greater attention—and abetted by that attention, greater distinctness and clarity—when it is represented
by a free morpheme than by a bound morpheme Thus, the English free verb root ship and the bound verb root -port have approximately the same sense in their concrete usages, ‘convey bulky objects by vehicle over geographic distances’, and they appear in constructions with comparable meanings, such as ship in, ship out, ship away, ship across, and import, export, deport, transport However, because, at least in part, of the difference in morphological autonomy of these two verb roots, ship foregrounds its concept with clarity and distinctness to a greater degree than -port does with its otherwise similar concept
Componential Properties of the Morpheme (Ab)
Factor Ab1: Solo versus Joint Expression
of a Component in a Morpheme
When a concept constitutes the sole and entire referent of a morpheme, it tends to have greater salience and individuated attention, but when it is conflated together with other concepts in a morpheme’s reference, it tends to be more backgrounded and to meld with the other concepts For example, the concepts ‘parent’ and ‘sister’ each receive greater individual attention when expressed alone in the separate mor-phemes parent and sister, as in one of my parents’ sisters But they receive less indi-vidual attention when expressed together in the single morpheme aunt, as in one of
my aunts
Factor Ab2: The Ensemble versus the Individual
Components of a Morpheme’s Meaning
In general, a language user directs more attention to the combination or ensemble
of the semantic components that make up the reference of a morpheme than to the individual components themselves That is, more attention is on the Gestalt whole
of a morpheme’s meaning than on its parts Even where the components are all essential to the morpheme’s use, a speaker or hearer is typically little aware of them, attending instead to their synthesis