Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Michael Pace-Sigge

Titel

Lexical Priming in Spoken English Usage

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

London: Palgrave Macmillan

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• 01 02 Corpus Linguistics is becoming an increasingly important branch of language research and interest has spread noticeably beyond the confines of academia, fuelled by applications like text predicting software. The idea of priming in language goes back to the early 1960s with the concept of a 'Teachable Language Comprehender', which started experiments into language processing and which inspired one of Google's chief engineers. The concept of Lexical Priming (Hoey: 2005) aims to supply answers as to how we can explain word choices and construction forms that are more frequent than laws of probability would allow. This book provides a range of arguments to support the validity of Lexical Priming as a linguistic theory, while it also extends the reach of what Lexical Priming has been used to describe. Beyond the written-text material originally used, this book provides evidence that lexical priming also applies to everyday spoken conversations as its psychological foundations predict that it should. 13 02 Michael Pace-Sigge is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Eastern Finland. He was previously a Lecturer at the University of Liverpool, UK. Michael's research interests include Corpus Linguistics, Lexical Priming, the Merseyside/Liverpool English (Scouse) accent, Phonetics, Sociolinguistics and Spoken English use. 04 02 1. Introduction 2. Lexical Priming: The Theoretical Backbone 3. Testing the Theory through Spoken-Corpus Evidence 4. Spoken Differs from Written – The Case of Yes and Yeah 5. Referring to Oneself and Others in Sco and Bnc/C 6. Intensifiers and Discourse Particles in their Use in Casual Speech 7. The Uses of Just and Like 8. The Most Frequent Clusters Found in Casually Spoken English Corpora 9. Conclusions Bibliography 02 02 This book shows that over forty years of psychological laboratory-based research support the claims of the Lexical Priming Theory. It examines how Lexical Priming applies to the use of spoken English as the book provides evidence that Lexical Priming is found in everyday spoken conversations. 16 02 Carter, Ronald, McCarthy, Michael. Exploring Spoken English . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1997) This is not a direct competitor but people who buy this as a primer will be introduced to the use of corpus material and my book can be seen as complementary as it looks, in more detail, at the issue of structures in language which are specific to the spoken form. Carter & McCarthy's book is fairly general and gives valuable insights in how spoken English is structured. My book goes one step further in that variation of spoken language is not just described as genre specific but is also found between different groups of speakers. In other words – dialect features exist not only in the occurrence of rare words, but also in the use of highly frequent words. Hoey, Michael. Lexical Priming . London: Routledge (2005) The proposed book can be seen as a companion piece to Lexical Priming. It provides both a sequel: looking at the history, development and varied experiments by psychologists to show the validity of the claims made by Hoey. It puts Hoey's claims in a larger context: "Priming, as a concept, started as a theoretical concept in Artificial Intelligence' and can be found realised today in the algorithms Google uses to predict search strings – all this is described in the proposed book. Lexical Priming also bases all its claims on written corpora. My book uses the methods developed by Hoey and employs them to indicate that lexical priming is also in evidence in naturally, informal spoken English. Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. Morphosyntactic Persistence in Spoken English: A Corpus Study at the Intersection of Variationist Sociolinguistics, Psycholinguistics, and Discourse Analysis . Mouton de Gruyter (2006) This is an extremely densely written book which is not easily accessible to non-specialists. It also tries to speak to a large and very varied readership, which might result in actually not being targeted enough. While it looks at Spoken English, it appears to be based on one single general corpus (of American English). While it mentions lexical priming, there is no in-depth discussion or historical research. Römer, Ute and Rainer Schulze (eds.). Exploring the Lexis–Grammar Interface . Amsterdam: John Benjamins (2009) This is an edition based on papers presented at the conference of the same name. While a number of these look at lexical priming or priming-like phenomena, they look at specific points where priming is found to occur. None of the articles presented, however, give any further background to where the notion of priming or lexical priming comes from.