Lexical Priming: The Odd Case of a Psycholinguistic Theory that Generates Corpus-Linguistic Hypotheses for Both English and Chinese

Abstract

Corpus linguistic research has had an iconoclastic effect on traditional linguistic theories and descriptions. Intuitions about the language have been found to be untrustworthy for over 20 years (e.g. Sinclair, 1991; Stubbs, 1995), and, in the wake of the methodological innovations associated with discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, attention has decisively shifted from guesswork about what an idealized speaker can theoretically say to hard evidence about what many thousands of speakers and writers actually do say. Whereas linguistics was once, for many, virtually synonymous with the study of grammar, the study of lexis is now widely accepted to be as important as grammar, with the role of collocation repeatedly recognized not only as ubiquitous but as central to our understanding of the way language works (Sinclair, 1991, 2004; Stubbs, 1995, 1996; Partington, 1998; Hoey, 1997, 2003, 2005). The generative linguist’s identification of competence as key to understanding linguistic creativity has been replaced by the corpus linguist’s identification of performance as key to understanding linguistic fluency (e.g. the idiom principle proposed by Sinclair, 1991; pattern grammar proposed by Hunston & Francis, 2000).