Introduction

This introductory chapter outlines Hoey's version of the Lexical Priming (LP) theory: what it is and what it is not; how it combines insights from psycholinguistics with the empirical enterprise of identifying patterns in corpora; what are its implications for the study of language and how it might be rendered even more robust. The chapter also introduces the materials and methods used in the book in an attempt to take LP theory a step forward.