Lexical Priming: Applications and advances
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.
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.