The textual priming of hard news stories

Lead Research Organisation: University of Liverpool
Department Name: English

Abstract

Recent corpus-linguistic work has shown that our lexical choices are governed by collocational, grammatical and textual considerations. Certain words can be shown to appear in (or avoid) paragraph- initial and text-initial position in specific genres far more often than can be explained by reference to random distribution. Although this phenomenon has been demonstrated for a number of words, there has been no large-scale study in one well-defined text type. In this project we explore in detail whether the words that journalists choose in the construction of their texts manifest the same kind of built-in bias for certain textual functions and positions

Publications

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Hoey M (2008) Lexicography, Grammar, and Textual Position in International Journal of Lexicography