Polysemy and lexical priming
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Fanie Tsiamita
Abstract
Hoey’s theory of lexical priming makes three claims with respect to polysemy. According to one of them, two similarly common senses of a polysemous lexical item will avoid each others’ primings (cf. Hoey 2005: 82). The aim of this paper is to examine the extent to which this claim is valid with data on the polysemous noun drive. The study focuses on the two most frequent uses of drive, namely “journey in a car or other vehicle” and “private road leading up to a house” and examines what semantic categories the pre-modifying adjectives and nouns of these two senses tend to belong to when they are preceded by an article. The results of the analysis support Hoey’s claim.
Abstract
Hoey’s theory of lexical priming makes three claims with respect to polysemy. According to one of them, two similarly common senses of a polysemous lexical item will avoid each others’ primings (cf. Hoey 2005: 82). The aim of this paper is to examine the extent to which this claim is valid with data on the polysemous noun drive. The study focuses on the two most frequent uses of drive, namely “journey in a car or other vehicle” and “private road leading up to a house” and examines what semantic categories the pre-modifying adjectives and nouns of these two senses tend to belong to when they are preceded by an article. The results of the analysis support Hoey’s claim.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
-
Part I. Setting the scene
- Technology and phraseology 15
- Corpus-driven approaches to grammar 33
- Valency – item-specificity and idiom principle 49
- Fowler’s Modern English Usage at the interface of lexis and grammar 69
- The psycholinguistic reality of collocation and semantic prosody (1) 89
-
Part II. Considering the particulars
- The lexicogrammar of present-day Indian English 117
- The semantic and grammatical overlap of as and that 137
- The historical development of the verb doubt and its various patterns of complementation 153
- The grammatical properties of recurrent phrases with body-part nouns 171
- A corpus-based investigation of cognate object constructions 189
- Revisiting the evidence for objects in English 211
- Lexico-functional categories and complex collocations 229
- Polysemy and lexical priming 247
- Local textual functions of move in newspaper story patterns 265
- Loud signatures 289
- Index 317
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
-
Part I. Setting the scene
- Technology and phraseology 15
- Corpus-driven approaches to grammar 33
- Valency – item-specificity and idiom principle 49
- Fowler’s Modern English Usage at the interface of lexis and grammar 69
- The psycholinguistic reality of collocation and semantic prosody (1) 89
-
Part II. Considering the particulars
- The lexicogrammar of present-day Indian English 117
- The semantic and grammatical overlap of as and that 137
- The historical development of the verb doubt and its various patterns of complementation 153
- The grammatical properties of recurrent phrases with body-part nouns 171
- A corpus-based investigation of cognate object constructions 189
- Revisiting the evidence for objects in English 211
- Lexico-functional categories and complex collocations 229
- Polysemy and lexical priming 247
- Local textual functions of move in newspaper story patterns 265
- Loud signatures 289
- Index 317
