ABSTRACT
The notion of textual colligation was first introduced in this book in Chapter 3. Our original definition of colligation included as one of its components ‘the place in a sequence that a word or word sequence prefers (or avoids)’, and this property of colligation was described in connection with consequence both in connection with the thematisation of the phrases as a consequence and in consequence, and (in Chapter 5) in our consideration of the operation of the drinking problem hypotheses on the polysemous uses of consequence. In this chapter, however, in addition to providing further evidence for thinking that priming for Theme or Rheme is common, the notion of textual colligation will be extended to cover not only positioning within the sentence but positioning within the speaking turn, the paragraph, the conversation and the text, though limitations in the corpus I am working with mean that observations on the speaking turn and the conversation are sadly going to be brief and programmatic only.
