Against the general neglect of attention phenomena in linguistics this study anchored in
Cognitive Semantics offers a first systematic adaptation of Leonard Talmy's groundbreaking
model of linguistic attention applied to Webbased data of English from an emerging lexical
network of emo(tion). Some fifty basic attention-related factors combine to yield increasingly
complex patterns of interaction convergence and conflict affecting all levels of linguistic
recombination from simplex morphemes up to the text format. Differences in attentional
profiles of linguistic representations may well account for conceptual alternativity another
fundamental cognitive principle in language: In their verbal interactions interlocutors in
production and reception will have to attend to bottom-up mechanisms and top-down strategies
of attention in organizing conceptual content and conveying subtle ceptions of reality.
