Chapter 2 introduces the concept of construal and explains how identical objects or real-world events can be perceived and described differently by multiple speakers, due to differences in individual speakers’ perspectives, the impact of culture as a lens on cognition, and the linguistic options available in a language. For instance, although Chinese shares similar concepts of time as English, associating time and space so that front and back can refer to temporal relationships, Chinese also exhibits a tendency to construct time vertically, in which the past is up and the future is down. Systematic crosslinguistic differences can also be found in descriptions of motion events across world languages. Learning to express time and motion in L2 Chinese often entails adjustment to new perspectives that are not articulated in a learner’s native language. L2 Chinese speakers therefore need ample opportunities to use the L2 functionally before they can develop L2-specific ways of thinking-for-speaking patterns.

Many types of event do not conform to the exemplar for transitivity -- namely, an agentive change of state event -- or the prototype of an argument structure construction, expressing an event with an acyclic (linear) causal chain. Reciprocal and reflexive events involve participants both acting on and being acted upon. Constructions for such events tend to recruit the prototypical transitive construction and evolve to an intransitive construction. Less prototypical bivalent events include motion, contact, and application/removal events. These events vary as to which non-agent participant is construed as core, and can be ranked on a hierarchy of transitivity. Experiential events involve an experiencer attending to a stimulus which in turn affects the experiencer; arguments of experiential events are expressed highly variably across languages. Ditransitive constructions are defined by the exemplar of the transfer event of giving. Ditransitive constructions differ as to the alignment of their nonsubject argument phrases with respect to the transitive construction, including the not infrequent neutral strategy in which both theme and recipient are encoded like transitive objects.