What is it about?
Published in 2005, Michael Hoey’s Lexical Priming – A new theory of words and language introduced a completely new theory of language based on how words are used in the real world. In the ten years that have passed, the theory has since gained traction in the field of corpus-linguistics. This volume brings together some of the most important contributions to the theory, in areas such as language teaching and learning, discourse analysis, stylistics as well as the design of language learning software. Crucially, this book introduces aspects of the language that have so far been given less focus in lexical priming, such as spoken language, figurative language, forced primings, priming as predictor of genre, and historical primings. The volume also focuses on applying the lexical priming theory to languages other than English including Mandarin Chinese and Finnish.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
Lexical Priming, as a theory, aims to explain the phenomena discovered through corpus linguistics techniques: collocation, colligation, semantic association and, indeed, the statistically significant preference or dis-preference of one word linking to another. This volume shows how the concept has been adopted a large variety of scholars for areas as diverse as spoken language, historical studies, genre prediction, metaphor analysis and languages other than English as well as teaching. This will cater for the interests of a large readership.
Perspectives
As a metaphor researcher, I am interested in our ability to manipulate or bend the limits of linguistic conventions (semantically, lexically, grammatically) in order to be creative. Lexical Priming is successful in offering up a psycholinguistic perspective to creative elements of language. This is shown in the discussions on polysemy, synonymy and metaphor within our volume. Crucially, the theory allows us to provide an explanation for why and how we recognise seemingly creative or original uses of language, based on our expectations. This makes the theory an original approach and an important contribution to research on creative language use.
Dr Katie J. Patterson
Universidad Austral de Chile
When, in 2003, I watched Michael Hoey give a pre¬sentation on Lexical Priming (LP) it seemed to be a revelation: the theory presented seemed to have the abil¬ity to provide answers to a number of contentious issues. Me and my co-editor were happy calling ourselves linguists. We were less happy to encounter a system of rules and regulations that seemed to be intractable, given the number of exceptions and “other uses” that had to be taken into account. A lot of the grammatical models that the editors had encountered during their years as undergraduate students seemed to be just that: models that appear to be fine in theory, yet, when confronted with everyday language use – both written and spoken – these models appeared to be both ill-fitting and incon¬sistent; suitable for some uses and unsuitable for others. This presentation given at the University of Liverpool Wednesday Seminar series presented an alternative, lexically-based and natural-language usage driven approach to language research. The idea for this book goes back to the summer of 2012. The SiBol CADS conference in Bologna had Michael Hoey talking about his theory and its application for prose-stylistic investigations. The eye-opened was, however, how many of the other presenters made direct reference to lexical priming. This, with the design of my own module of corpus linguistics and lexical priming which I have now been teaching since early 2013, made me realize that the interest shown in and the applications of the theory should be made available to a wider public.
Dr Michael Pace-Sigge
UEF
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Lexical Priming, July 2017, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/scl.79.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
