Evolution and evaluation of Lexical Priming: A theory on the processing and production of language

What is it about?

Lexical Priming (LP) is a theory developed by Michael Hoey more than 20 years ago on the processing and production of language. The theory proposes that language users subconsciously memorise the contexts in which words occur — their collocations, colligations, semantic associations, and pragmatic functions — and that these experiences shape (or 'prime') language production. In this paper, we revisit and expand LP by incorporating evaluation at the colligational, collocational and textual levels, and by applying it to corpus data in Japanese, alongside English. Our analysis suggests that the notion of 'lexical template' (a semi-fixed evaluative pattern) may help us describe patterns of use better than the 'word'; that the analysis of Japanese can help us refine our theoretical and methodological tools for investigating the functioning of language across linguacultures; and, above all, that evaluation theory can be integrated fruitfully into LP theory.

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Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Hoey’s LP theory was extremely innovative: it was one of the first lexis-driven theories of language to combine corpus data with insights from psycholinguistics and cognitive research. Now that more and more linguists recognise the value of an interdisciplinary approach that integrates linguistic evidence with findings from other fields, we need studies that can provide the theoretical and methodological tools to do so. Moreover, we need to examine data from languages other than English. We consider this study to be a modest contribution to this endeavour.

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