With some friends I have been working through Michael Hoey’s Lexical Priming (2007).

Priming is a psychological term for experiments in which subjects are presented with lists of words, one of which is primed to trigger a response in another word later. For example, the word table is given in the earlier list of words, and this primes a later response in which subjects are asked to give a word beginning TAB. More than chance numbers of subjects offer table, as a result, the psychologists argue, of the earlier priming.

Hoey “tweaks” this meaning of priming for his own purposes. Lexical priming becomes a property of the word. Each word in his analysis is primed to collocate* with other words. This information is only accessible because of the power of computers to process enormous databases and yield hundreds of examples of any word in its contexts.Lexical priming is different for every individual depending on their experience of language. It is also different for every genre. For example, the bulk of Hoey’s database is The Guardian newspaper, and he is at pains to point out constantly that what is true of this sample of language may not be true of others.

What is fascinating about this book is that every chapter tells the reader things s/he did not know and would not have expected. For instance, sixty is primed for vagueness (e.g. about sixty) but not 60. Or that around does not have the same collocates as round.

*Collocation is the occurrence of words within, say, four spaces of one another in more than random numbers.