Lexical Priming theory

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 Hoey’s later unpublished work was characterised by his desire that LP theory be tested on discourse-types beyond newspaper texts and in languages other than English.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.