The Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, is pleased to announce an open lecture titled “Aspects of Language Differ in their Accessibility to Consciousness” by Professor Leonard Talmy from State University of New York at Buffalo. The lecture will be held on 18th September (Thursday) 2014, from 16.00-18.00, in the Building of Faculty of Modern Languages, room 1.007/1.008 (1st floor), at Dobra 55 Street.

Different aspects of language have different degrees of accessibility to consciousness and, when in consciousness, have different degrees of salience, from backgrounded to foregrounded. For example, the meaning of a lexical morpheme is generally more accessible to or salient in consciousness than the meaning of a grammatical morpheme; the amalgamated meaning of a morpheme more than its semantic components; the meaning of an expression more than its form; and explicitly represented concepts more than implicit concepts. Certain principles seem largely to account for such differences, among them principles of relevance, perceivedness, and quantity. The same pattern of differential consciousness seems to hold for other cognitive systems, such as visual perception and motor control.