Includes bibliographical references and index.

Machine generated contents note: -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Lexical Priming: The Theoretical Backbone -- 3. Testing the Theory through Spoken-Corpus Evidence -- 4. Spoken Differs from Written -- The Case of Yes and Yeah -- 5. Referring to Oneself and Others in Sco and Bnc/C -- 6. Intensifiers and Discourse Particles in their Use in Casual Speech -- 7. The Uses of Just and Like -- 8. The Most Frequent Clusters Found in Casually Spoken English Corpora -- 9. Conclusions -- Bibliography.

"Corpus Linguistics is becoming an increasingly important branch of language research and interest has spread noticeably beyond the confines of academia, fuelled by applications like text predicting software. The idea of priming in language goes back to the early 1960s with the concept of a 'Teachable Language Comprehender', which started experiments into language processing and which inspired one of Google's chief engineers. The concept of Lexical Priming (Hoey: 2005) aims to supply answers as to how we can explain word choices and construction forms that are more frequent than laws of probability would allow. This book provides a range of arguments to support the validity of Lexical Priming as a linguistic theory, while it also extends the reach of what Lexical Priming has been used to describe. Beyond the written-text material originally used, this book provides evidence that lexical priming also applies to everyday spoken conversations as its psychological foundations predict that it should"-- Provided by publisher.