ABSTRACT
Lexical priming has so far been talked about in terms of sentence-internal features, though references to priming for Theme have referred to textual colligation and have thereby hinted at a textual dimension. The discussion of ambiguity at the end of the previous chapter, however, showed that a theory of lexical priming needs to address the issue of how text organisation might be affected (or created) by lexical priming, and how conversely it might affect it. Ideally, text should refer here to both speech and writing, but what follows is limited for reasons of space and corpus construction to written text only. I shall argue in Chapter 8 that there are textual and pragmatic matters that stand separate from lexical priming, but we should not be in a rush to dismiss discourse issues as independent of and unconnected with the matters we have been considering in this book. In this chapter I shall argue that lexis is in fact intimately bound up with decisions of discourse organisation.
