Corpus Evidence, Lexical Priming and Teaching Lexical Items More Effectively: A Case Study of the Functional Word “AS”

Abstract

Lexical priming theory argues that an expression consisting of word sequence (WS) prefers to appear in context with particular lexical items, collocations, grammatical patterns (colligations), semantic associations, pragmatic associations, textual ways, genre and style. Drawing on this, this study assumes that a lexical item has a systematically changing associations profile according to the word sequence prior or subsequent to it. Enabling learners to learn a phrase with all its associations, stores it in mind and retrieves it during speech with all its associations make them more fluent. Exploring the associations of functional words in context can then be of great importance due to their high frequency of uses, and can shift their teaching from that based on their functions in context, as is the case in current curricula, to that based on their different associations in context. To this end, we chose the functional word as then extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC) a list of the most frequent two-word sequences containing as then quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed data from their concordance lines using lexical priming theory principles as a guide to describe their associations. Overall, our analysis revealed that when as functional words based on their various associations instead of their functions for more fluency in speech.