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corpus of Japanese from Q&A fora as well as from data from English language sources, including Hoey’s own studies, his unpublished lecture slides given to us, and more recent corpora, we expand Hoey’s notion of priming and seek to confirm the wider applicability of LP theory.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