The topic of attention in relation to language has the potential for uniting the efforts of linguists and cognitive psychologists. This essay will be oriented toward their relationship at the level of simple sentence planning and comprehension, since this is a critical level of modeling. The dynamics of focusing in discourse processing should have as its basis the relationships between the structure of attention, awareness and sentence structure. The essay considers the functioning of attention in normal language use only, although there is also an extensive literature on different issues of the pathology of attention in language use.