Corpus evidence, lexical priming and teaching lexical items more effectively : a case study of the functional word “as”

Abstract EN

Lexical priming theory argues that an expression which consists of a certain word sequence (WS) prefers to appear in context with particular lexical items such as particular collocations, grammatical patterns (colligations), semantic associations, pragmatic associations, textual ways as well as particular genre and style.

Drawing on this, this study assumes that when a lexical item is checked in context, the profile of its associations systematically changes in accordance with the word or the word sequence prior or subsequent to it, which makes the student who studies a particular phrase with all its associations, stores the phrase in his mind and then retrieves it during speech with all its associations, which makes him/her more fluent in speech.

This study assumes that exploring the associations of functional words in their contexts is of great importance due first their high frequency of uses, and second, in order to shift from teaching them based on their function in context, as is the case in the current curricula, to teaching them accompanied by all their different connections 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 words sequences containing as 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 collocates with different items, its associations exhibit systematic change.

Thus, the methodology of this study can be adopted in the study and teaching of functional words based on their various associations instead of their functions for more fluency in speech.