Evidence of Lexical Priming

I use corpus linguistics very much along the lines of John-Sinclair's

"Trust the text". I neither do corpus-assisted research (where a set theory
and a set notion of language is simply proven by bringing in results from
real (or natural) data nor is it corpus-based research (pretty similar to the
above. However, findings are based on results found by corpora research).
I undertake, I think, the more adventurous and less framework-bound
version: corpus-led research. This means I approach data not with a fixed
idea of what I want to find or how I would call collocational or colligational
elements and structures. Too often, fixed notions and strict classifications
have blinded researchers - and made them miss patterns. I believe that
the natural occurring language itself provides the answers. Because of
this, I am reluctant to use traditional terminology. It seems as if the most
innocuous item (word) can have different functions and meanings and that
is very much dictated by the item's surroundings. For this reason, "Lexical
Priming" is a theory I find extremely helpful.

In my research (and, hopefully, very much the focus of my research

career) is the spoken word. This is in many ways the harder road to travel:
transcribed spoken language is hard to come by and, where it exists,
comes in the form of small corpora (very different to written corpora where
researchers have now access to large chunks of the world wide web).
Taping and transcribing one's own corpus is extremely time-consuming
and tedious and, where third-party transcripts are being used, differing
standards of transcription can render chunks of information useless.
Speech is, however, our primary way of communication and, consequently,
it corpora of spoken language should be able to reflect used speech at its
purest. At the same time, spoken language is ideal for corpus-led research,
as it is now widely accepted that people, when speaking, adhere to
different grammatical rules than written text.

I compare material from my own corpus - over 100k words of spoken

Liverpool English, with two general corpora of spoken English from across
the UK. The aim is to find whether a particular (geographical and / or
socio-economic) speech group is primed to use certain key words and key
phrases and ways that differ from an average found used across the
country. I believe that this has been successful and that that I have
proven that the English spoken in Liverpool is, sometimes subtly,
sometimes more obviously, different in its use of the same lexical stock as
found in the general corpora. I see this of evidence that members of one
speech community (Liverpudlians) are primed to use certain items and
phrases in ways that are either more or less strongly preferred by other
English speakers in the UK.

Michael Pace-Sigge 28/VI/2010