Leonard Talmy. A windowing to conceptual structure and language

This interview is the result of a series of email exchanges with Leonard Talmy from February to May, 2005. It was designed to cover Talmy’s research career from its beginning (the linguistic representation of conceptual structure, cf. 1972, 1985, 1991, 1996, 2000ab) to present day (sign language, cf. 2003, in press; the attentional system of language, cf. forthcoming). It was divided into two main parts: (i) a general overview of Talmy’s main ideas about language and cognition, both past and future, and (ii) a detailed discussion of one of Talmy’s most widely discussed and successful areas of study: lexicalisation and typology in motion events. In this ARCL issue we publish only the latter.