Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language

Lexical Priming: a new theory of words and languageMichael Hoey, Lexical Priming: a new theory of words and language. Stroud, United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, 2005. Pp. Xiii + 202. ISBN 0-415-32863-2.Hoey's book 'Lexical Priming: a new theory of words and language' discusses a new view of language, explaining the existence of combinations of words. Through the lenses of native speakers, this view of language assumes that language users store the words they know in the context in which they have heard or read before, be it spoken or written. Then, they will build up a collection of these words and/or phrases in contexts. Subconsciously, the process of noticing that these contexts have some grammatical pattern to them becomes to occur.The book is divided into ten chapters of varying length. In the first chapter, Hoey (2005) starts describing a brief notion of lexical priming by arguing traditional methods of vocabulary acquisition and giving a definition of lexical priming. In Chapter 1, drawing data and evidences form language corpora, Hoey suggests that we acquire vocabulary not only from explicit learning, but mostly from contexts including linguistic and contextual information, social interaction, etc. in which we repeatedly encounter. Lexical priming is what we are primed (readied by our prior experience of words) to expect words to be in the units of other words (their collocations) and also expect words to appear in certain grammatical situation (grammatical colligations) and in certain position in text and discourse (their textual colligations). From this definition, it is implied that lexical priming is words that are primed to appear at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of an utterance. In other words, every time we encounter a word or phrase, we store it along with all the words that accompanied it and with a note of the kind of context it was found in. To prove his claim, concordancing can be successfully used to prove the position of lexis because collocation is seen to be closely related to the psychological phenomenon of priming that arises from a language user's repeated encounters. A concept of productive priming (related to how we create our language use) and receptive priming (words that we expect from speakers) are also introduced.Subsequently, in Chapter Two, Hoey suggests that, because of some aspects of linguistic creativity in a language, semantic association as a word or word sequence associated in the mind of a language user with a semantic set or class is claimed to contribute to word priming. In order to support this claim on the effects of priming on semantic association, Hoey uses statistical evidence of priming of some words token from a corpus of 'The Guardian'. In this regard, this chapter is presented as a showcase, taking the word consequence (result) to illustrate the semantic set of collocates that are associated with the word. From a comprehensive corpus analysis, as considered from pragmatic perspective, four major types of association regarding the word consequence are offered, which include: 1) logical association (e.g., logical, ineluctable, direct), 2) negative evaluation (e.g., awful, fire, appalling), 3) seriousness of the consequence (e.g., important, serious, significant), and 4) unexpectedness of the consequence (e.g., unforeseen, curious, surprising).Chapter Three is mostly devoted to priming and colligation (grammar and its position). Hoey uses the word in winter and in the winter as an example so as to the relationship of lexical priming and grammar. As supported by the corpus, in winter tends to go with the use of present tense, while past tense with in the winter. Then, Hoey takes that word consequence as an example to reveal that the word consequence has a tendency to occur as head of a nominal group but rarely found as pre- or post-modification. In order to prove his hypothesis about priming of synonyms, similarities, and differences of priming positions, Hoey further takes the word reason, as a synonym of consequence, into his investigation. …