ABSTRACT
To this point in the book, we have described a framework of rhetorical priming
and a catalog of strings derived from that framework to help us understand
everyday language and its rich and diverse role in priming audience. Let us
shift gears and now consider the proven and potential implications of a rhetor-
ical priming framework on the study of English texts. In the most extensive
study to date, Jeff Collins (2003) combined the framework described in this
book and the catalog derived from it with methods of discourse analysis
(Johnstone 2002) and corpus linguistics (Biber, Conrad & Reppen, 1998) to
identify and confirm stable usages of specific combinations of our priming
strings in two broad corpora of published texts. Collins’ results suggest the
usefulness of the priming theory at associating different functioning texts with
differences in the combinations of primings on which they rely. His results
further point toward a heretofore hidden layer of “languaging” (Becker, 1991)
that is evidently part of the professional writer’s craft.
