Lexical Priming: Evolution, Evaluation and Applications to English and Japanese(Routledge Studies in Applied Linguistics)

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corpus of Japanese from Q&A fora as well as from data from English language sources, including Hoey’s own studies, his unpublished lecture slides given to us, and more recent corpora, we expand Hoey’s notion of priming and seek to confirm the wider applicability of LP theory.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.

Table of Contents:
List of figures and tables; Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Typographical conventions; Introduction (0.1 A primary outline of research aims, or: What is this book about?; 0.2 Materials and methodology); Chapter 1: Hoey’s original Lexical Priming theory, 2005 (1.1 The principal hypotheses; 1.2 The implications of LP theory; 1.3 Language acquisition and performance; 1.4 Lexical Priming and meaning; 1.5 Lexical Priming, grammar, syntax and phraseology; 1.6 Lexical Priming and creativity; 1.7 Conclusion); Chapter 2: The Evolution of LP theory from 2005 to today (2.1 Introduction; 2.2 Lexical Priming in a corpus of a spoken discourse-type; 2.3 Lexical Priming: Applications and advances, 2017; 2.4 Forced Lexical Priming; 2.5 Conclusion); Chapter 3: Data, methods and tools (3.1 Introduction; 3.2 Corpus-assisted discourse studies (CaDS); 3.3 The data; 3.4 Conclusion); Chapter 4: LP and grammar (4.1 Introduction; 4.2 Grammatical ‘categories’; 4.3 What is a ‘word’?; 4.4 Colligational primings; 4.5 Conclusion); Chapter 5: Lexical Priming and polysemy (5.1 Introduction; 5.2 Nesting, polysemy and ‘drinking problems’; 5.3 Polysemy in Japanese: The case of amai ‘sweet/permissive’; 5.4 Conclusion); Chapter 6: Evaluation in English at the lexical and clausal levels (6.1 Whatever happened to evaluative primings?; 6.2 What is the role of evaluation in communication?; 6.3 Evaluation in English: From simplicity to complexity; 6.4 Conclusion); Chapter 7: Evaluation in Japanese discourses at the lexical and clausal levels (7.1 Evaluation in Japanese at the collocational level; 7.2 Evaluation in Japanese at the clausal level; 7.3 Corroboration in the jaTenTen11; Conclusion); Chapter 8: Evaluative cohesion in whole texts (8.1 Introduction; 8.2 Propositional textual cohesion in Hoey 2005; 8.3 Evaluative textual cohesion; 8.4 Switching evaluations: From positive to negative and back again; 8.5 The evaluative cohesion of complete texts; 8.6 Conclusion); Chapter 9: Lexical Priming and the systems of 'modality' (9.1 Modality in modern standard English grammar; 9.2 Modality in English and LP theory; 9.3 A pause for summarising: What then is a ‘clause’ or ‘sentence’? Proposition, evaluation and modal stance; 9.4 Modality in Japanese; 9.5 Modality in the Relationship corpus; 9.6 Conclusion); Chapter 10: Lexical Priming and im/politeness (10.1 Introduction; 10.2 From evaluation to im/politeness;10.3 Face-work: Where priming combines with inferencing; 10.4 Politeness primings in Japanese: The case of apologies; 10.5 Overriding of politeness primings in Japanese; 10.6 Conclusion); Chapter 11: Lexical Priming in interactive question-and-response discourse-types (11.1 Introduction; 11.2 A few more words on Yahoo! Chiebukuro; 11.3 Another question-and-response discourse-type: Press briefings; 11.4 Comparing and contrasting questions and responses in Japanese; 11.5 Conclusion); Chapter 12: Lexical Priming and linguistic variation (12.1 Introduction; 12.2 The challenges of comparison; 12.3 Comparing the Relationship and News corpora through keywords; 12.4 Investigating similarities; 12.5 Conclusion); Chapter 13: A round-up and a request; Appendix; Index

About the Author :
Alan Partington has been Professor of English Linguistics at the Universities of Camerino and Bologna since 1999. He is a co-founder of the Siena-Bologna (SiBol) Group of Corpus Linguistics Research. He was the first Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Corpora and Discourse from 2018 to 2022. Eugenia Diegoli is Assistant Professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her research interests include Japanese language and linguistics, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and pragmatics. Her first monograph Online apologies in Japanese was published in 2025.