Against the general neglect of attention phenomena in linguistics this study anchored in Cognitive Semantics offers a first systematic adaptation of Leonard Talmys groundbreaking model of linguistic attention applied to Webbased data of English from an emerging lexical network of emotion. Some fifty basic attentionrelated 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 bottomup mechanisms and topdown strategies of attention in organizing conceptual content and conveying subtle ceptions of reality.