A Corpus-based Study On Lexical Priming And Intertextual Priming

In this thesis an analysis of the lexical priming features from the lexical level and ananalysis of the intertextual priming features from the textual level of the news reports on theNorth Korean rocket launch reported by the American media are made for the purpose of findingthe attitudes and stances of the American media and the American government towards thisissue.Lexical priming is explored from the aspects of collocational, semantic and colligationalprimings: Firstly, by constructing a collocational network collocational priming is analyzed, theresult of which shows that the nuclear nodes North and Korea are collocationally primed withthree collocational types: EVENT, OUTER CONCERN and REMARKS. Secondly, the analysisof semantic association indicates that North and Korea are primed with negative semantic wordslike ADVERSITY, CRITICISM and DANGER. Thirdly, the cluster North Korea iscolligationally primed after preposition, and as the subject, object, and clause subject, and in theform of possessive case. But North Korea is more likely to be colligationally primed as Subjectand to occur after preposition. The number of colligational priming for North Korea as a clausesubject is the least.As to intertextual priming, the specific intertextual priming is studied from the aspects ofnews source, reporting modes and reporting verbs, the generic intertextual priming is exploredthrough a case study. It is found that a negative priming of the North Korea is constructed andconveyed to the readers by the American news reports. In a word, specific and genericintertextual priming can be used by the reporter to construct different positions, which caninduce the readers to read as how they are supposed to.The most important contribution of the thesis lies in three aspects: firstly, the concept ofintertextual priming is put forward by the author for the first time. Secondly, a collocationalnetwork is drawn to analyze the collocational priming, which helps to study the collocations in aset. Thirdly, appraisal theory is applied to help strengthen the study of reporting verbs in thespecific intertextual primings.