This book offers in-depth qualitative case studies of 70 acts of quoting verbatim performed by 16 US speakers across a range of public settings. While their written versions unequivocally index the other voice via quotation marks, the video data drawn from the internet largely lack any non-verbal cues. Contrary to expectation, the quotations' verbatimness is hardly ever translated into the gradient media: It neither stands out by vocal parameters (pauses, pitch, or intensity) when analyzed acoustically with Praat; nor are (manual) gestures, shift of gaze or body posture called on to serve as regular discriminating quoting practices. In general, the other voice is effectively found backgrounded, if not suppressed, in its oral performance, unless explicitly introduced by a digital quotative.

Again firmly rooted in Leonard Talmy's Cognitive Semantics, this new study moves beyond the analysis of single schematic systems in language contributing to the linguistic task of conceptual integration. It investigates for the first time effects of linking up Force Dynamics, a conceptual category generalizing over the traditional notion of the causative, and the Attention system of language, as detailed in Talmy's most recent extended draft version. To accommodate the conceptual and formal complexities involved at the interface of Attention, Force Dynamics, and Cognitive State and to allow for an appropriate degree of fine-grainedness the analytical framework affords, the exposition has been constrained to the golf scenario, where forces are at work in the physical and sociodynamic domains.

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.