Lexical Priming

A New Theory of Words and Language

Michael Hoey

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134333585
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Filología
• Categoría: Idiomas

Lexical Priming proposes a radical new theory of the lexicon, which amounts to a completely new theory of language based on how words are used in the real world. Here they are not confined to the definitions given to them in dictionaries but instead interact with other words in common patterns of use.

Using concrete statistical evidence from a corpus of newspaper English, but also referring to travel writing and literary text, the author argues that words are 'primed' for use through our experience with them, so that everything we know about a word is a product of our encounters with it. This knowledge explains how speakers of a language succeed in being fluent, creative and natural.

1 Collocation and lexical priming

DOI: 10.4324/9780203327630-1

Introduction

In this book I want to argue for a new theory of the lexicon, which amounts to a new theory of language. The theory reverses the roles of lexis and grammar, arguing that lexis is complexly and systematically structured and that grammar is an outcome of this lexical structure. The theory grew out of an increasing awareness that traditional views of the vocabulary of English were out of kilter with the facts about lexical items that are routinely being thrown up by corpus investigations of text. What began as an attempt to account for collocation turned into an exploration of grammatical, semantic, sociolinguistic and text-linguistic phenomena. This book is the story of my intellectual journey. Accordingly it begins with my journey’s starting point – the pervasiveness of collocation.

The traditional view of the lexicon and grammar

The classical theory of the word is well reflected in those two central compendia of linguistic scholarship of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – the dictionary and the thesaurus. According to such texts, words have pronunciation, grammar(s), meaning(s), etymology and relationships with words of closely related meanings (synonyms, superordinates, co-hyponyms, antonyms). According to the theory underpinning these texts, lexis interacts with phonology through pronunciation, with syntax through the grammatical categories that lexical items belong to, with semantics through the meanings that the lexical items have and with diachronic linguistics through their etymology. In the most extreme versions of the theory, the connection between the word and the other systems has been so weak that it has been possible to argue that grammar is generated first and the words dropped into the grammatical opportunities thereby created (e.g. Chomsky 1957, 1965) or that the semantics is generated first and the lexis merely actualises the semantics (e.g. Pinker 1994).

Theories of lexis that can claim to be more sophisticated, such as systemic-functional linguistics, likewise sometimes represent the relationship between grammar and lexis as if the precise lexical choice was the last choice to be made. Even if one starts from the assumption that lexis is chosen first, or at least earlier, it is easy to assume that it passes through what might be regarded as a grammatical filter which organises and disciplines it. Tagmemics treats lexis as having as much theoretical importance as grammar (Pike and Pike 1982), in that this theory posits three hierarchies – the grammatical hierarchy, the phonological hierarchy and the referential or lexical hierarchy, but such a tripartite division only underlines how separate the levels of lexis and grammar are conceived to be.

The picture I have just sketched is in some respects lacking in light and shade. Construction grammar, for example, does not separate syntax and the lexicon in the manner I have been describing (Fillmore et al. 1988; Goldberg 1995). Even so, its theory still talks of lexical constructions and syntactic constructions, and a key tenet of the grammar is that grammatical patterns have precise meanings that are distinct from those of the lexical items used in the patterns. Chomsky (1995) assigns inter-language variation to the lexicon. Hudson’s Word Grammar (1984), as its name implies, starts from the assumption of a connection between lexical and syntactic description. Likewise Hunston and Francis (2000) identify and describe the close relationships found between lists of specific lexical items and the availability of particular grammatical patterns, and in so doing arrive at much more interesting accounts of grammar than are normal in descriptive grammars (as illustrated in Francis et al. 1996, 1998). A precursor of this work was the Cobuild English Grammar (Sinclair 1990). Nevertheless they continue with a separation of lexis and grammar; indeed, their approach depends upon it. I shall return to these grammars in Chapter 8, along with a discussion of the work of Sinclair, who goes furthest in dissolving the distinction between lexical study and grammatical study and whose work was in several important respects the starting point for the positions presented here.

Collocation and naturalness

The problem with all but the last two theories is that they account only for what is possible in a language and not for what is natural. This book is concerned, in part, with how naturalness is achieved and how an explanation of what is natural might impinge on explanations of what is possible. A key factor in naturalness, much discussed in recent years, is collocation, and this is therefore an appropriate place to start such an explanation. Collocation is, crudely, the property of language whereby two or more words seem to appear frequently in each other’s company (e.g. inevitable + consequence). (I shall provide a more careful characterisation below.) Collocations – recurrent combinations of words – are both pervasive and subversive. Their pervasiveness is widely recognised in corpus linguistics; probably all lexical items have collocations (Sinclair 1991; Stubbs 1996). The notion is usually attributed to Firth ([1951]1957), and certainly his discussion of the concept underpins all that has followed on the subject. Interestingly, though, Doyle (2003) draws attention to the fact that the word collocation was being used in linguistic discourse prior to Firth; in this connection he draws attention to a citation from 1940 in the Oxford English Dictionary (1995). This observation is confirmed by inspection of the 1928 edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary, which has the following entry for collocation:

collocation … Act of placing, esp. with something else; state of being placed with something else; disposition in place; arrangement.

The choice and collocation of words. Sir W Jones.

… collocation denotes an arrangement or ordering of objects (esp. words) with reference to each other.

It is improbable that the eighteenth-century amateur linguist Sir William Jones, who is traditionally credited with having set in motion the nineteenth-century’s exploration of language change and language families, can also be credited with the late twentieth-century’s exploration of lexical relations, though I have not sought out the original from which the quotation is taken to verify that assumption. But the OEDs and Webster’s definitions do suggest that collocation has been slowly maturing as a notion.

As befits a notion that has been developing slowly and whose study has been transformed with the onset of large corpora and sophisticated software, collocation is a word with a number of definitions. Partington (1998) groups these neatly into textual, statistical and psychological definitions. The textual definition is closest to the use of the word exemplified in the Webster definition quoted above: ‘the occurrence of two or more words within a short space of each other in a text’ (Sinclair 1991: 170). This definition (which I should add does not reflect Sinclair’s own use of the term) is not useful and can result in a woolly confusion of single instances of co-occurrence with repeated patterns of co-occurrence. I shall not be using collocation in this way. Whenever I need to refer to the occurrence of two or more words within a short space of each other, I shall talk of ‘lexical co-occurrence’.

The statistical definition of collocation is that it is ‘the relationship a lexical item has with items that appear with greater than random probability in its (textual) context’ (Hoey 1991a: 6–7). This definition, though better, confuses method with goal. It is true that to discover collocations one needs to examine the statistical distribution of words and that those that occur in each other’s company more often than can be accounted for by the mechanisms of random distribution can be said to collocate. But the definition says nothing interesting about the phenomenon; it gives no clues as to why collocation should exist in the first place. For this we need to turn to Partington’s third type of definition – the ‘psychological’ or ‘associative’ definition.

There are two well-known ‘psychological’ definitions, and neither is successful for our purposes, though they are both insightful. The first is that provided by Halliday and Hasan (1976: 287) in their pioneering work on cohesion in English. They refer to collocation as a cohesive device and describe it as ‘a cover term for the kind of cohesion that results from the co-occurrence of lexical items that are in some way or other typically associated with one another, because they tend to occur in similar environments’. Their discussion of collocation as a cohesive device, and the exemplification they provide, makes it clear that they are not talking about the regular co-occurrence of words in close proximity to each other. The association they refer to must therefore be a psychological one, in which words are regularly associated in the mind because of the way they are regularly encountered in similar textual contexts. As a definition, it is hard to operationalise and indeed Hasan (1984) abandons the concept, replacing it with more specific semantic relations (hyponymy, meronymy etc.). It does however place collocation where it belongs – as a property of the mental lexicon. (We shall revisit Halliday and Hasan’s notion in Chapter 6, where it will be found to have a proper place in an account of text after all.)

The second definition comes from Leech (1974: 20), who talks of ‘collocative meaning’ which, he says, ‘consists of the associations a word acquires on account of the meanings of words which tend to occur in its environment’. As couched, this is too general to cover the word in its most common current usage. It also implies that the word acquires connotations as a result of the words that surround it, a position that was formulated by Louw (1993) and taken up by Stubbs (1995, 1996). This position is discussed in Chapter 2 and is not uncontroversial (see Whitsitt 2003). Leech’s definition does however pick up both the statistical reality and the psychological reality and, most valuably, posits a causal connection between the two. Partington (1998:16), commenting on his definition, notes that ‘it is part of a native speaker’s communicative competence … to know what are normal and what are unusual collocations in given circumstances’. I would quarrel with the wording here in that Partington allows for ‘unusual collocations’ but the point he is making is important.

We now have to consider what counts as being in the environment of another word and, more fundamentally still, whether the word or the lemma is the appropriate analytical category in this context. Jones and Sinclair (1974) provided the first influential computational analysis of collocation. Their corpus was only 147,000 words – computers at that time struggled to deal with even that much data – but it was sufficient to allow them to determine that the optimum span for identifying collocation is up to four words on either side of the node word (the node word being the word under investigation and typically shown at the centre of the concordance lines). This finding has not been seriously disputed, though collocational software will often permit a wider span (e.g. ± 5).

Collocational analysis can be done on lemmas or words. Renouf (1986), Sinclair (1991), Stubbs (1996) and Tognini-Bonelli (2001) have all argued against conflating items sharing a common lemma (e.g. political, politics; break, broke; onion, onions) on the grounds that each word has its own special collocational behaviour. In Hoey (1991a, 1991b) I found it useful to work with lemmas, but for present purposes I concur with these linguists that conflation often disguises collocational patterns. Williams (1998) notes that in the context of molecular biology research papers the collocates of the word gene and those of the word genes are quite distinct, both prior and subsequent to the node word. Doyle (2003) likewise shows that there are few shared collocates between grammatically related forms of lemmas in scientific textbooks; he looks, for example, at amplifier, amplifiers (only three shared collocates), circuit, circuits (only two shared collocates), frequency, frequencies (only one shared collocate) and shift, shifts where he finds no shared collocates at all. When various forms of a lemma do share collocates (e.g. training and trained share collocation with as a teacher), they can of course be discussed together, but common collocates should never be assumed.

So our definition of collocation is that it is a psychological association between words (rather than lemmas) up to four words apart and is evidenced by their occurrence together in corpora more often than is explicable in terms of random distribution. This definition is intended to pick up on the fact that collocation is a psycholinguistic phenomenon, the evidence for which can be found statistically in computer corpora. It does not pick up on the causal relationship identified by Leech, but only because that will be attended to separately.

The pervasiveness of collocation

The importance of collocation for a theory of the lexicon lies in the fact that at least some sentences (and this puts it cautiou...