Lexical Priming: Evolution, Evaluation and Applications to English and Japanese

This pioneering volume builds on Prof. Michael Hoey’s seminal work on Lexical Priming (LP) theory by applying it to specific varieties of Japanese, alongside English, as a first step in corroborating and expanding the validity of LP theory. The book sets the scene by surveying LP research on specific discourse-types, inspired by Hoey in 2005, and by elucidating the ways in which corpus research, discourse, and psycholinguistics might be taken together to better understand language acquisition and production in ways neither corpus linguistics nor cognitivism alone could envisage. Drawing primarily on a web corpus of Japanese from Q&A fora as well as from data from English language sources, including Hoey’s own studies, his unpublished lecture slides given to us, and more recent corpora, we expand Hoey’s notion of priming and seek to confirm the wider applicability of LP theory. We begin by discussing the many claims of LP, regarding collocation, meaning, grammar, polysemy, cohesion, and creativity, in light of empirical corpus evidence from Japanese and English discourse-types. We also then show how LP theory has considerable explanatory value in fields not previously envisaged, principally evaluation (including evaluative cohesion), modality and politeness, all cognitive phenomena which leave their mark in the linguistic trace we call corpora. This volume will be of interest to scholars in language teaching and learning, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, Japanese linguistics, grammar and lexicography.