Lexical Priming In Ranking Collocations In Chinese Sports News

Lexical priming is dominantly used to study English texts.Many previous studies focused on rhetorical or stylistic effects caused by the overriding of established primings.Few studies have applied lexical priming theory to Chinese texts or analyzed Chinese at clausal and textual levels.The present study focuses on priming in ranking collocations in Chinese sports news,evidenced by corpus data.The data is natural,and a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses will be carried out.The study in this thesis collects 2,696 news reports from 2016 to 2018 from China News.These texts cover qian-X-(ming)expressions where X can be a character or numeral.The texts will be segmented and tagged in ICTCLAS 2012,and analyzed by Anctconc 3.5.8 and Excel later,combined with manual examination.In the self-built sports news corpus and its four sub-corpora with four forms of qian-X-(ming)as keywords,primings in collocation,semantic association,pragmatic association,colligation at the clausal level as well as primings in textual collocation,textual semantic association,textual colligation at the textual level will be analyzed and compared.The comparisons of primings are between two groups of orthographically different target expressions and between two groups of synonymous expressions different only in one single morpheme respectively.The study aims to(1)prove the existence of primings in ranking collocations in Chinese sports news and the feasibility of using lexical priming theory in Chinese analyses,and thus identify patterns in producing and processing natural language;(2)discover whether primings of orthographically different expressions or synonymous expressions different only in one morpheme in Chinese are identical or not.The results suggest that:(1)lexical priming theory can be effectively used in ranking collocation study in Chinese sports news and can be extended to other Chinese expressions in further research;(2)the research based on lexical priming theory and corpus linguistics can reveal the naturalness of ranking expressions;(3)orthographically different expressions or synonymous expressions different only in one morpheme in Chinese,though sharing many primings in common,still differ in certain aspects,with the latter exhibiting more differences;(4)news writers can better communicate the message to readers,and news readers can correspondingly better grasp the message by understanding primings presented by certain expressions at clausal and textual levels in this genre or domain.