Chapter 7 uses an excerpt from T, Harry Williams' 1963 Lincoln and His Gen- ... their goals and methods in part from John Sinclair and his associates and in.
Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language. BY MICHAEL HOEY. London/New York: Routledge,
2005. Pp. 202.
Reviewed by CATHERINE SMITH, Troy University
In Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language, Hoey argues for a new theory of lexicon, and in so doing, a new theory of language. The general argument is that lexis is structured in complex yet systematic ways, and this structure is the driving force behind language use. The theory reverses the traditional roles of lexis and grammar: lexis organizes grammar (and ultimately discourse). Analyzing lexical collocation patterns (i,e, the co-occurrence of a pair or string of words) and colligation patterns (i,e, the association between a lexical item and its structural location and language function) affords an understanding of structural (grammar) and discourse (text) patterns, as well as changes or innovations which occur in a language. The catalyst of the theory is the pervasiveness of collocation, and Hoey draws on the Guardian corpus (and occasionally other corpora) to illustrate the theory's manifestation across linguistic fields: syntax, semantics, discourse (text), and language creativity/change. Corpus linguists might anticipate a chapter which describes the procedures for collecting, analyzing, and quantifying lexical collocation patterns in the corpus; however, the book is more theoretical than applied, and describes a theory whose presentation is inductively organized according to concordance inquiries on specific lexical items (or sets of lexical items to illustrate variation on a theme). Thus, a description of corpus research methods is not included. Nevertheless, Hoey acknowledges the theoretical nature of the work at the end of the book, calls his work sparse in comparison to the task at hand, and challenges his colleagues to assist in the exploration. Chapter 1 begins by describing the effects which two 18th and 19th-century English classics—the dictionary and thesaurus—have had on the conceptualization of language, Hoey points out that these works describe English in terms of pronunciation (phonology), grammatical categories (syntax), meanings (semantics), and etymology (diachronics). This taxonomy inadvertently establishes an assumption that language systems are separate and hierarchical. Some linguists have built their work on this assumed discrete nature of language systems (e,g, Chomsky's Universal Grammar in which grammar is generated first, and language is comprised of grammatical slots into which words can be placed) while others have built their work on relationships between the systems (e,g, Richard Hudson, Su-
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san Hunston and Geoffrey Francis). After laying out this background for the book, the chapter introduces the main premises of lexical priming: collocation is a psycholinguistic phenomenon (what is possible in a language is different from what is "natural" or actually done), sentences are made up of interlocking collocations, each word is primed for specific collocation (nested in the speaker's memory through repeated exposure; note that Hoey explicitly defines and illustrates the "nest" metaphor), and cognitive priming is the driving force behind language use, language structure, and language change. The chapter also lists 10 hypotheses of lexical priming (e.g. every word is primed to occur with particular other words, every word is primed to occur with particular semantic sets, every word is primed to occur with particular pragmatic functions) which are explored in the subsequent chapters. Chapter 2 describes potential lexical priming processes for semantics. For example, words may be primed to collocate with one item in a semantic set, and then extend their collocations accordingly from there. They may also be primed to collocate with words which mark specific kinds of relationships (e.g. contrasting vs. compatible). Also, lexical priming can occur as a result of semantic prosody. Additionally, words are primed for pragmatic association (e.g. sixty is primed to occur with lexical items indicating VAGUENESS, such as about sixty, around sixty, almost sixty, getting on for sixty, sixty-odd, sixty-some). Furthermore, Hoey explains that there is a complex relationship between intuition and priming, and thus semantic and pragmatic associations may (and probably do) differ across language users. The chapter showcases an illustrative concordance analysis of consequence as it is used in the Guardian corpus, and concludes that its particular collocations are grammatically tied. This conclusion serves as a springboard for Chapter 3. Chapter 3 explores the idea that some words may be primed to occur (or not occur) in certain grammatical environments. The chapter opens with an illustrative analysis of winter, and establishes, for example, that if a speaker selects present tense and winter, there is an 80% chance that the temporal adverbial will be in winter (i.e. in winter + present tense). The illustration's implication is that language users select tense, aspect, and temporal expressions at the same time (note: applied corpus studies support this idea, and to some extent, they have established the frequencies of such collocation patterns in some registers). Winter is also described as being primed to occur with material process verbs and relational process verbs. This opening analysis leads into a discussion of colligation, its history in the 1950s, and its re-birth in contemporary British work. Hoey proposes a definition in terms of the grammatical collocations of a word, the grammatical functions of a word or group of words, and the place in a sequence preferred by a word. The rest of the chapter re-examines the lexical item consequence with regard to its colligational patterns, and the themes introduced at the beginning of the chapter with the winter illustration are developed in more detail. Chapters 4-5 expand on lexical priming with regard to lexical relations and
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polysemy. Chapter 4 questions whether hyponyms (e.g. SKILLED ROLE OR OCCUPATION: accountant, actor, actress, architect, carpenter), synonyms (e.g. consequence, result), and synonymous phrases (e.g. around the world, round the world) share similar lexical primings. The chapter explores these examples and concludes that the sample does not share the same primings (although the synonymous phrases share similar lexical primings with coUigational differences). Hoey hypothesizes that the words are primed similarly, but they distribute themselves differently across lexical, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic contexts (note: applied corpus studies support the latter half of this hypothesis). Similarly, Chapter 5 asks the same questions of polysemous and homonymous lexical items. It uses consequence {= RESULT) vs. consequence {= IMPORTANCE) as the item of inquiry, and organizes the investigation around three hypotheses (82):
1 ) The rarer sense of a word will avoid the collocations, semantic associations, and colligations of the more common sense of a word. 2) If two senses of a word are equally or nearly equally common, they will avoid each other's contexts of language use. 3) Where neither 1 or 2 apply, the effect will be humor, ambiguity, or the invention of a new sense. At the end of the chapter, Hoey illustrates that, while a text is usually drawn upon to resolve a word's ambiguous sense, it can also create ambiguity. This influence of text on lexical items is examined in the next two chapters. While the previous chapters describe relationships between sentence-internal features and lexical priming. Chapters 6-7 address the effects of text on lexical priming (i.e. the relationships between discourse-level conventions and the use of lexical items). The presentation is organized around three hypotheses (115): 1 ) Words (or nested combinations) may be primed positively or negatively to participate in cohesive chains of different and distinctive types (textual collocation). 2) Words (or nested combinations) may be primed to occur (or to avoid occurring) in specific types of semantic relation, e.g. contrast, time sequence, exemplification (textual semantic association). 3) Words (or nested combinations) may be primed to occur (or to avoid occurring) at the beginning or end of independently recognized discourse units, e.g. the sentence, the paragraph, the speech turn (textual colligation). Chapter 6 addresses the first two hypotheses, and Chapter 7 addresses the third. Chapter 6 uses excerpts from a novel and travel book to illustrate how speakers have expectations about the type of cohesion (i.e. the length of chain in which a word is expected to participate, whether a word is expected to participate in cohesion at the sentence level vs. text level, or the cohesion category in which a word
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is expected to participate) and strength of cohesive relationships (i,e, whether a word is expected to participate in cohesive chains and how often) which words may have, Hoey uses several sets of lexical items to demonstrate these observations. He also draws on the research of other linguists to illustrate how systematic semantic associations of linguistic items are observed but conceptualized (or labeled) differently (e,g, Hoey cites Hunston's 2001 observation that may not be is associated with contrast between ideal and more achievable; cited in Hoey 124), These expectations determine what is natural (as opposed to what is possible) in a language. Chapter 7 uses an excerpt from T, Harry Williams' 1963 Lincoln and His Generals to investigate the role of lexical priming in paragraph organization, Hoey's selection of the text is motivated by its use in Young and Becker (1966, cited in Hoey 134), 'a key paper in the early description of paragraphing ,,, [which was] never properly published,' Chapter 7 is particularly interesting to writing instructors since he re-addresses and extends the descriptive work on paragraph organization begun in the 1960s, He applies his own matrix methodology (135; Hoey 2001 & 1991) which uses parallel questions posed to the paragraph's topics to establish a baseline description of paragraph organization. Then, against this description, he compares students' paragraphing decisions which they made when asked to sequence a list of out-of-order sentences. The results indicate that text organization has a lexical perspective which is colligationally signaled, Hoey identifies that texts have systematic patterns which need to be investigated, and he stresses the importance of studying corpora as an essential strategy for discovering and describing the structures of discourses as a whole. This conclusion will be appreciated by corpus linguists who investigate discourse structure patterns. Chapters 8-9 address language creativity. Chapter 8 begins with a succinct contrastive description of generative linguistics versus corpus linguistics, which I will quote here since Hoey so clearly organizes the general contributions and research directions of the two linguistic approaches, Hoey writes (154): Painting in broad-brush strokes, traditional generative grammarians have derived their goals, if not their methods or descriptions, from Chomsky, and for them the distinction of a grammatical sentence from an ungrammatical one has been a central consideration. They have not been interested in probability of occurrence, only in possibility of occurrence. Most of their data have been invented examples,,, They have, in short, been concerned with the creativity of language. Their models have been designed to account for any sentence,,. Still painting with a broad brush, corpus linguists in contrast have derived their goals and methods in part from John Sinclair and his associates and in part from what concordancing software currently makes feasible. These linguists have typically seen their goal as the uncovering of recurrent patterns in the language, usually lexical but increasingly grammatical. They have ,,,
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been concerned with the probability of occurrence, and their data have been always authentic. They have been concerned with fluency in language..., and corpus models have been designed to account for the normal and the naturally occurring. Some linguists may take issue with the BROAD BRUSH descriptions, and corpus linguists who write computer programs may object to the stress on concordancing software. Nevertheless, the opening to Chapter 8 nicely portrays how the two approaches complement one another in the discipline. Once this is done, Hoey also addresses the relationship between linguistics and literature in his definition of creativity. At one end of the spectrum is Chomsky's definition in which utterances are not recalled but newly created. At the other end of the spectrum is literature: 'original texts that refresh the language and force us to think and see things in new ways. If linguists cannot say something interesting about literary language, it is an admission that we have not yet got to the heart of our discipline' ( 153). In the middle of these two ends, Hoey identifies a third type of creativity which are utterances that are unexpected, innovative, and require our attention to process their meaning. Chapter 8 investigates the Chomskyan type of creativity using priming prosody as a method of explanation. Chapter 9 investigates the other two types of creativity using OVERRIDING PRIMING as a method to explain how humor is created in the Guardian, style is created in literature, and memorability is created in poetry. Chapter 10 closes the work by addressing theoretical and practical issues. In the same clear manner in which Chapter 1 describes definitions and hypotheses, and Chapters 2-9 discuss and illustrate these. Chapter 10 follows suit by identifying applications of the lexical priming theory. Hoey reminds us that priming is, to a certain extent, unique to each individual since it consists of the words we encounter from the people who speak to us. That said, he addresses the sociological implications of the theory by mentioning ways in which society is harmonized through lexical priming (e.g. through education texts, media texts, music texts, etc.). He also addresses the theory's application to second language acquisition (SLA). Language learning is essentially learning new primings, and thus the process of SLA depends on exposure (i.e. being exposed to properly organized language evidence at the threshold of one's competence to facilitate generalizations, and being required to produce language). The theory implies that there is no discrete difference between native and nonnative speakers, since no one speaker is equipped to address all contexts in a language (e.g. medical discourse). He also addresses cracks in the theory and how conflicting data can be reconciled. Lastly, as mentioned at the beginning of this review, he invites other linguists to develop lexically-driven models of inquiry, and to apply these models in a manner that integrates different linguistic approaches. Overall, the book lays out a fairly clear map which can be used to organize future lexically-driven investigations across
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many areas of linguistics and applied linguistics, A notable strong feature of the book is its integrative character and the explicitly drawn connections between generative linguistics and corpus linguistics as well as those drawn between linguistics, literature and creative writing.
REFERENCES
2001, Textual interaction, London: Routledge, 1991, The matrix organisation of narrative and non-narrative text in English, Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on the description and/or comparison of English and Greek, 216-253, Thessaloniki, Greece: Aristotle University, HUNSTON, SUSAN, 2001, Colligation, lexis, patterns, and text. In Patterns of text, ed, by M, Scott and G, Thompson, 13-33, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, YOUNG, RICHARD and ALTON BECKER, 1966, The role of lexical and grammatical cues in paragraph recognition. Studies in language and language behaviour. Progress Report No, 2, Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Research on Language, University of Michigan, HOEY, MICHAEL, HOEY, MICHAEL,
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