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Article published In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 30:3 (2025) ► pp.352–375

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Lexical Priming theory

Evolution, evaluation, extension

ORCiD logo with link | Bologna University
ORCiD logo with link | Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Published online: 1 September 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.24030.par
Abstract
This paper is an early step in a wider project which, on the behest of the late Prof Michael Hoey, attempts to review the evolution of Lexical Priming (LP) theory since its first appearance in the early 2000s. Hoey’s later unpublished work was characterised by his desire that LP theory be tested on discourse-types beyond newspaper texts and in languages other than English. Here, we make a first attempt to test LP theory on Japanese data from a web corpus. Referring to Hoey’s own examples, to our Japanese data and to English data from the web (enTenTen21) and newspaper (SiBol) corpora, we suggest how evaluation theory might fruitfully and seamlessly be integrated into LP theory, and how textual primings are even more powerful than originally envisaged. We demonstrate how we are primed to produce and process texts into evaluative blocks so that they cohere evaluatively as well as propositionally.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research aims
  • 3.Materials and methodology
  • 4.Revisiting LP theory
  • 5.The status of the ‘word’
  • 6.Evaluation
    • 6.1Evaluation and lexis
    • 6.2Evaluation and collocation
    • 6.3Evaluation and semantic preference
    • 6.4Evaluation and colligation
    • 6.5Evaluation and lexical templates
    • 6.6Evaluative cohesion: Evaluation at the textual level
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (51)
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