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Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language.

Article Excerpt
Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language. BY MICHAEL HOEY. London/New York: Routledge, 2005. Pp. 202.

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...