Lexical Priming is a theory that has been developed by Michael Hoey
since the mid 1990s. Though it was not yet referred to as lexical priming,
Hoey's work on bonding already provided a framework for what would
become the Lexical Priming Theory
40:
What we are now contemplating, (…), is the possibility of finding bonding across texts written between three and fourteen years apart, solely because of the mental concordances of the authors retained records of the texts they had read, which in turn were written in the light of their author's mental concordances, which (perhaps) included sentences drawn from a common primary source (author's highlights)
(Hoey 1995: 90)
These mental concordances would later be seen by Hoey as having been
created through the process of priming.
According to Hoey
41publication and development of the theory
started with the talk
42given at PALC (University of Lodz, April 12-14
1997), Poland. The following year, Hoey delivered the Pit Corder lecture
at the Annual Meeting of the British Association for Applied Linguistics.
One direct response was Hunston (2001) Colligation, lexis, pattern and
text. This paper has been discussed in detail above. Hunston combines
Hoey’s ideas with the work she has done on Pattern Grammar. This paper
is still mainly concerned with colligation:
40 This is a genuine find by me. Hoey thought that Lexical Priming had been a new departure. (Personal communication). I show, however, that the basic idea is a development of the notion of bonding worked on by Hoey (1991; 1995)
41 Personal communication 42 Later published as Hoey: 1997
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Cohesion and colligation are themselves connected, as each depends upon repetition. Cohesion depends on repetition within the text (as Hoey draws on his own work in Hoey 1983;1991 here), while colligation depends on repetition between the text and other texts … (Hunston 2001: 14f)
The first texts referring to the process of priming appeared during
2002/2003 in a number of papers by Hoey. While each one of these was
drawing on and building from its predecessor, each paper highlighted a
different angle of the theory. First there was Lexis as Choice (2002).
During ICAME 2002 in Götheburg, Sweden, Hoey was still referring to
Textual Colligation and it had the subtitle A special kind of priming.
Then, in 2003, priming actually appeared in the title: Lexical Priming
and the properties of text and Why grammar is beyond belief. All these in
turn led to the publication of the monograph Lexical Priming in 2005,
which discusses the issue in-depth.
Priming itself will not be discussed in this section, as a separate part
is reserved for that. That priming – a subconscious forming of the ability
to relate entities to each other – and language structure based on how
words link up with each other (collocate), go together, has most succinctly
been put by Michael Stubbs:
Examples of collocation show that there is much in language use which is automatic and unconscious. This means that introspection about lexical meaning is often unreliable or at least incomplete, and also that, in terms of its automaticity, lexis is much like syntax. (Stubbs 2001b: 89 also in 2006: 26f.)
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This highlights some more important points. Stubbs, like Sinclair and
Hoey, find increasing evidence that it is the lexis that structures the
grammatical structure (rather than the other way around). Lexical
Priming neither operates in nor follows a fully pre-determined universal
pattern, as Hoey is the first to admit:
… grammars exist as a product of our primings. Each of us, presumably to different extents and with different outcomes and different degrees of regularity, constructs a grammar – leaky, inconsistent, incomplete – out of the primings we have for the sounds, words, phrases and so on that we encounter. This grammar, or perhaps one should say grammars, may in turn be used to regulate and remark on our linguistic choices.
(Hoey 2008b: 7)
This particular summary of Hoey’s theory points to one crucial quality of
priming: it is something that exists within the individual first of all.
However, as social beings and as integral part of all our animate and
inanimate surroundings, we are touched, influenced and formed by what
we are exposed to. Language is no exception. Would this contradict the
validity of the theory, given that every speaker would identify her/himself
first as a native speaker of a (or a set of) specific language(s)? In short,
the answer is no, as the sum of individual primings create the “leaky”
fuzzy total of any given form of communication. Should an individual
priming or grammar fall too much out of the boundaries of acceptability,
communication would no longer be effective. At the same time, primings
are the product of encounters with other people, who themselves have
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been through the process of having encountered for themselves what the
“norms” of effective communication are.
Early on in his book, Hoey (2005) draws our attention to the
hypotheses on which his Lexical Priming theory is based:
Priming hypotheses
Every word is primed for use in discourse as a result of the cumulative effects of an individual's encounters with the word. If one of the effects of the initial Priming is that regular word sequences are constructed, these are also in turn Primed. More specifically:
1 Every word is primed to occur with particular other words; these are its collocates.
2 Every word is primed to occur with particular semantic sets; these are its semantic associations. 3 Every word is primed to occur in association with particular pragmatic functions; these are its
pragmatic associations.
4 Every word is primed to occur in (or avoid) certain grammatical positions, and to occur in (or avoid) certain grammatical functions; these are its colligations.
5 Co-hyponyms and synonyms differ with respect to their collocations, semantic associations and colligations.
6 When a word is polysemous, the collocations, semantic associations and colligations of one sense of the word differ from those of its other senses.
7 Every word is primed for use in one or more grammatical roles; these are its grammatical categories.
8 Every word is primed to participate in, or avoid, particular types of cohesive relation in a discourse; these are its textual collocations.
9 Every word is primed to occur in particular semantic relations in the discourse; these are its textual semantic associations.
10 Every word is primed to occur in, or avoid, certain positions within the discourse; these are its textual colligations.
Very importantly, all these claims are in the first place constrained by domain and/ or genre.
(Hoey 2005: 13)
As can be seen, Hoey tries to cover every occasion, location and
opportunity in which a word or word-sequence could be employed. The
very apparent repetition of the term ‘word’ (or “keyness” should one
compare Lexical Priming to similar texts) indicates how the lexis is seen
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as the centre of this theory. Equally, the consistent use of the cluster “is
primed” indicates how Hoey might prime the readers themselves.
It is Biber (2009) who found in his research that spoken language is more
formulaic than (academic) written language:
Conversation
– Most lexical bundles are sequences rather than frames – Both variable and fixed slots are usually function words – Content words are highly restricted Biber (2009)
By contrast, Biber points out that in academic writing “high frequency
patterns tend to be frames”. This means that a fixed colligational
structure allows for a greater lexical variation. In spoken language,
however, formulaic chunks are far more prevalent. This is explained by
the ad-hoc nature of spoken language production:
Psycholinguistic implications -
• In speech, lexical sequences -- including content words -- stored and used as chunks
• In writing, frames stored separately from content words • Many content words select a single frame
• But frames associated with a large set of possible content words • Other (most?) content words are not associated strongly with a frame
Biber (2009)
Finding “lexical sequences stored and used as chunks” in spoken
language use provides a link between Biber’s (2009) research and Hoey’s
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(2005) claims. It also provides a further reason why it is essential to use
speech to test the validity of lexical priming theory.
In this thesis, I will take the Lexical Priming hypotheses as the
background to my research. If lexical priming is a valid theory, it should
be applicable not just to the written word as found in the Guardian
corpus (Hoey 2005) but should also be applicable to language as sspoken
by any given sspeech community:
“..A word’s likely primings for a particular set of members of a speech community must be limited to the genre(s) and domain(s) from which the evidence has been drawn. For this reason, indeed, specialised corpora may be more revealing than general corpora.” (Hoey 2008: 9f.)