One of the kinds of pattern which serve to govern the distribution of attention in the attentional system. This pattern is illustrated by the following examples:

1. The wine merchant sold the champagne to Edith
2. Edith bought the champagne from the wine merchant In the first sentence the seller, the wine merchant, is the focus of attention while in the second example the purchaser, Edith, is the focus of attention. This results from the mapping of attention onto a particular entity in the scene. The conceptual structuring system encodes this in two ways: firstly, by the selection of one of several verbs relating to the commercial event frame (buy versus sell, for example); and secondly by the associated word order.