Exploring Hoey's notion of text colligation in a corpus of student writing

Hoey (2005:13), in his radical new theory of the lexicon, Lexical Priming, proposes that '[e]very word is primed to occur in, or avoid, certain positions within the discourse; these are its textual colligations'. He argues that such primings are tied to contexts, and, therefore, it should not be assumed that the priming that operates in one textual domain will operate in another textual domain. I explore Hoey's notion of textual colligation, by examining the textual locations and environments of a variety of single and multiword items in a corpus of undergraduate assignments, derived from the British Academic Written English corpus. I identify where the items occur in the text, and I then examine their textual environments, both at a sentence level and at a broader textual level. To test the notion of textual colligation, I discuss the evidence for disciplinary variation and whether words or phrases are primed with different textual colligations, depending on discipline and genre. I argue that textual colligation is bound up with experiences and understandings, not just of how language is used, but also of how texts are organised.