Paragraph boundaries and discourse genre: Applying Lexical Priming to Spanish written texts

Abstract

Lexical Priming (LP) is the name of the linguistic theory developed by the British linguist Michael Hoey (cf. Hoey 2005 and 2013), where corpus-linguistic concepts such as collocation and colligation are related to the experimental findings of psycholinguistics in processes of word association. The theory deals with lexical, grammatical and textual priming and is seen as particularly suitable for the investigation of some text-organisation issues as, for example, the boundaries across paragraphs. 

Using basic ideas from LP and corpus linguistic methods, this contribution explores paragraph boundaries and their relation to the concept of discourse genre. The main aim is to discover linguistic patterns recurring in paragraph-initial position in some selected discourse genres of written Spanish, with the aid of the text processor tool Sketch Engine. A set o language patterns, lexical collocations and grammatical colligations, are explored that commonly occur in paragraph beginnings of the selected texts, both general and more specific, and some cohesive choices and tendencies noted for the genres examined. 

Paragraph behinnings in writing are special and sensitive points in a text where the writer needs to consider what the most appropriate element is depending on a number of factors, among which the choice of genre is an important issue. This study is a modest attempt at demonstrating that genre is central in studies of language use based on corpora and disregarding a view of language description where languages are seen as a homogeneous whole (see Berber Sardinha 2017: 224)