Lancaster University | Week 2: Conversation with Michael Hoey

OK, well it's a delight today to be here in my home city of Liverpool, having a conversation with an old
friend, Mike Hoey, from the University of Liverpool.

Same here.

And thanks for the cup of tea, it's a cold day today, and it's in much need.

Well you at least don't get blown about.

No, I don't. It's very efficient in that respect. And it also saves a lot on the barber's bills. OK. I thought
today we might have a talk about your work on collocation. Because obviously collocation is key
concept in corpus linguistics. It's given us great insights into word meaning, and in some sense, really

challenged the way we view word meaning and how meaning is constructed in language.

I think we've talked about that on the course so far, but what we haven't talked about are what I would
think of the more advanced developments in thinking about collocation. And though you'll be
embarrassed to hear me say it, I think I'd lay those [INAUDIBLE] at your door. Because to some extent,

you've started to theorise collocation in terms of the mind, and models and theories of language. Is that
a fair description?

Yeah. So to say, yes.

So how do you do it? How do you build from the idea that words that we like have some type of glue
between them, through to developing a theory of language in the mind?

Well I suppose the answer to that is that I, for a long while, worked with a-- like most corpus linguists--
with a statistical definition of collocation. And used those in all the work I did.

Things like log likelihood scores, and that?

Yeah, that kind of thing, exactly. But I actually felt that in some senses there was a kind of-- this was

missing something. A corpus actually doesn't represent anyone's experience in language. Not even the
Editor of The Guardian will have read every article in The Guardian. You've got a Guardian corpus.

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And even if they had, they'll have heard more language besides. Very much more.

Absolutely. Their mother and their father will have talked to them just as much as the journalists and

the--

Hopefully more.

Hopefully more, hopefully more. So I was uneasy about the claims about the language, because words
must come together for a reasons. They don't just, it isn't simply an arbitrary thing, nor is it a logical

thing--

Right.

--you can't say these two words have to logically go together. That's why they collocate.

OK. So you can proceed from the observation that they're co-occuring more than by chance. But then

the question is, why? How? What's the purpose?

Exactly. Exactly. And I realised that for me, I needed the definition of collocation to be a psychological
one. And the corpus linguistics data becomes evidence for it.

Right.

And in a sense, although a corpus doesn't represent anyone's experience of language. It can simulate

the effect, the exposure to language, that any individual might have, in a more or less helpful way. So

drawing upon the work that's been done by psychologists, into semantic priming and repetition priming,
which is work where essentially what happened was an informant was asked to read a word, and then

press a button and say the word when they saw a second word.

Right.

Actually, I'm not sure about the pressing of the button. They essentially say, as quickly as they could,

the second word they saw.

Psychologists always have you pressing buttons.

They do.

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I'm sure there was a button.

I'm sure there was a button pressed. But the key point was, they measure the time it takes you to read

the second word. And what they discovered was-- of course If you put any random two pairs of words
together, there is a kind of momentary pause, however it's in microseconds. It's not a real pause. But a

momentary pause while you formulate your thoughts, and you answer the next time.

But that if certain words were put first, they would speed up the recognition of the second. An
interesting, and more importantly almost, certain words would slow it down.

Right.

So if you put up the word 'cow', and then add the word milk, 'cow' will speed up your recognition of the
word 'milk' by a microsecond or so.

And at this point, when you make that observation, you're getting temptingly close to making claims
about how words are organised in the mind, I would guess.

Exactly. Exactly, exactly. And crucially, it means that those words must be, in some respect, closer

together.

All connected in some way.

And interestingly, of course, you could put up, say, I don't know, 'cathedral' and then 'milk', there would

be no change. But if you put up 'horse', and then 'milk', it will slow it down. Because your mental lexicon
around horses do not, for the most part, include milk.

If you were in Mongolia, it'd be a different story.

This is sort of a cognitive dissonance of sorts.

Exactly, exactly.

that it slows us. So people are finding difficult to process how horse and milk go together, in Western
culture, at least.

Exactly, exactly. So at the very least, it didn't necessarily indicate that we were storing language exactly

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as found, but it does suggest that words are closely associated.

Some sort of cumulative effect?

It must come from, there's no other place it can come from, since it is cultural. Since as I mentioned

with Mongolia, they do drink horse milk there, so it wouldn't happen there. It must therefore come from
our experience of language, coming from all the conversations. And of course other things, visual things
as well, but dominantly through language.

So it means that the language is being stored in a way that reflects the way we've received it. So that's
semantic priming. Repetition priming is more interesting.

In repetition priming, a psychologist presents a first word, then a second word, and they could well be--

and usually are-- arbitrary. So 'onion' and 'scarlet', say. Which neither grammatically nor semantically
make much sense.

Although I'm sure somebody will now write a mythology about the scarlet onion, which is grown in

[INAUDIBLE].

Gotta happen, gotta happen.

But let's that you're right, because I think you are.

We could go for another colour if we want.

Anyway, if you put those two words together, then of course the person says the first, and they'll then
say the second. And the speed is the normal speed. Put the same pair of words up again, a significant
amount of time later, and the first one will speed up the second.

Right.

Now what that indicates-- if this order helps explain the phenomenon of semantic priming, it also
interestingly, importantly, explains the phenomenon of collocation.

Yes.

Because what it suggests is that-- there's no other explanation that can be offered for it-- is that the

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words are being remembered in the order that they're encountered.

Right.

There are two possibilities here. One is that we only notice the abnormal.

So it's salient, rather than frequent, because it's abnormal.

Yeah. The other is that we are actually just absorbing it all. And if we're going to account for collocation,
at very least in the childhood, if not in adulthood-- but I think since collocation clearly changes in adults
as well-- we have to assume that essentially, everything we listen to, or hear, listen to, or read, is

actually being taken on board as the strings of language that they are.

Yes.

Rather than-- as Pinker would argue-- broken down into abstract minds.

And each grammatical category is in primes.

Ironically, he uses the terms in almost exactly the opposite way that I do. But psychologists do, actually.
I don't know where he got these terms from. But the point is, instead of being, as has been traditionally
assumed, there's been kind of almost instant brain dampener that turns into something. It's being

stored as it comes.

Now if that--

Not analysed as though we're mini-linguists and [INAUDIBLE].

No, not analysed immediately at all, but remembered. And that's why you and I can spot plagiarism.
Yeah,

it's very easy to spot.

Yeah, and partly it's to do with styles change, and that's one factor. But also-- certainly in my
experience, anyway-- I sometimes recognise stuff.

Yeah.

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But the stuff I'm recognising, I probably read, in some cases, 10 years ago. But you say, that's not-- I
know where that comes from. I'll go and look at it. And then, more benignly, that's why a person writing
a novel or writing a play, or a poem, can use a phrase from another poem, or a play, or novel, and you
recognise it.

[SNAP]

You say, that's it. Therefore it's got to be, sorry, it's just that it's got to be there for, I mean, that is a
crucial factor. Our ability to recognise an illusion. But also, something I was working on some years ago,

when I went to 'cohesion' that something that's said in, say, page 10 of a novel, will often connect up
with something that's said--

So it's sort of long-term links? Yeah.

I had a Ph.D. Student who did a study of Flaubert's Parrot, and he actually, Julian Barnes actually
makes, quite deliberately, there are connections in the first chapter with the last. Wording connections.

Words which are referring to words.

Yeah, phrases.

Pronouns or anaphora or something like that.

Yeah, that's right. And you've got to remember it. And you've not got to remember it in the sense of,

'I've got the abstract semantics up here'. You've got to remember the wording, and then you can
connect them up.

So essentially, if we take that as being the explanation for this well-grounded psychological research-- I
mean I should say that the semantic priming work dates from the early 1970s, and the first work on

repetition priming dates from the late 1970s-- so we're not talking about fly-by-night stuff that could be
knocked down tomorrow. We're talking about stuff that's stood the test of time.

So with that in mind, it becomes possible to say that a collocation-- it's a long answer to your question--

It's a difficult question.

It is. It's an interesting one.

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The theory of mind, just explain it in two words.

That's right. But it means that collocations are the product of memories. It is as simple as that. They're

the products of memories of the way language occurred to us.

Right.

And from that, lots of other exciting things then flow.

Well actually, I had a very nice example of this recently I thought I'd share with you. I was at the school

in North Liverpool, for the ESRC Festival of Social Science. And I was showing them how corporate

revolution as dictionary writing As part of it, I got them to ransack their minds and write a few dictionary
definitions.

And one was the word 'threadbare'. And there was a lad in one group who said, I've never heard of that
word before. I said: 'well, just put down the first thing that comes into your mind'. 'But I don't know the

word', he said. I said, 'just the first word'. And the first word he wrote down was carpet.

And of course when you look in a corpus, the top collocate of 'threadbare' is carpet. So there was

something where he was actively denying conscious knowledge of that word. But somehow,
somewhere in the past he'd heard it often enough associated with--

Marvellous.

--carpet, that he could reproduce that collocate for writing his own dictionary definition. And this is a
powerful example I think-- OK, admittedly, an anecdotal one-- but a powerful example I think of the type

of thing you're talking about.

Well, I mean, not as good a story-- that's absolutely wonderful, you need to write that up somewhere--

[INAUDIBLE]

--because that really is a lovely story, it's really interesting. But nevertheless, I think relevant in this

context, is that my grandson is three-and-a-half now. We had him up last Christmas, when he was two-

and-a-half. And he loves being read to. We got a whole new set of books, and which I've given him by
his father, which were clever. But couldn't have been argued to be clever clever. They were a bit too
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aware of their own writing skills.

And it became apparent that he didn't really like the new set of books that he'd been given, and was

pushing them way a little bit when I would read. And I would say, you know, 'do you want this book?'

And if it was one that's in our stock, or one of the old ones he had, he'd say 'yes'. And he'd say more or
again.

But, crucially, when he said, when I offered him one of the new books, he didn't say 'no'. He said,

maybe later.

Oh right.

And what had happened-- and he did that more than once, he said maybe later. Pushing the book

away.

Yeah.

And I worked out that because first of all, he's got the combination, maybe and later. He's got it from his

dad, who, when he asks for something, says maybe later. And he'd spotted that never actually

happened.

It's a polite way of saying no.

It's a polite way of saying no. So what we've got is a combination of words that's been identified, with a

particular meaning, which means polite with a particular pragmatic. Which means polite way of saying
'no'.

That's good.

And that's at two-and-a-half. So combine that with your story. What we're doing is recognising that
children are actually have got a good stock. But what both of them have done-- and this is very

important-- is they've reproduced that stuff.

Yeah.

So it's not just recognition. Even though he didn't recognize the word 'threadbare'

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He promised me he didn't know.

--he didn't know it. And yet, he was able to reproduce the combination with the carpet.

Yeah, it was fascinating. It really was.

Yeah, absolutely. And likewise, my grandson was able to reproduce the combination with the right
pragmatics.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, he didn't want to be rude to his grandad.

So what we're looking at-- and this is, I think, like a vital aspect of priming theory-- is that the goal of the

stuff goes in, and then we use it.

Right.

But we use it. You were saying earlier, we're not analysts, we're not linguists in our heads. But in one

sense we are. We notice the familiar patterns and we reproduce them. Because we're not linguists in
the sense that we're reflecting upon that. And we're not introspective in any overtly conscious way, most

of the time, at any rate.

But what we are doing is actually able to say, to utter.. because I can't ask the key questions of

language study, which is how we're fluent.

Yeah. Because it is an amazing think that we do when we speak like this.

Absolutely.

It's very demanding, cognitively.

Yeah.

And certainly speaking on the fly, and listening on the fly, and responding on they fly, is very

demanding. Also, in terms of us being overt linguists most of the time. Of course, most people will

advance and be able to reflect, like the chap in the school that I talked to.

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But the key thing is, you're right. We don't do it very often, and we don't do it in a very structured way.

And that's what makes linguistics as a subject so interesting. It keeps us in work, of course.

It is so. Absolutely. Because whenever you come up with a kind of linguistic thing, and you say you
discover it. You say it to someone who's not a linguist, they say, 'oh, I think I already knew that'.

Because the moment you make it conscious, it's not producing a discovery that they think: 'gosh, never

knew that'.

Yeah.

It's something they always did know, of course. But they've never ever been able to articulate it.

Yeah, because it just seems so obvious suddenly.

Well Mike Stubbs has a lovey bit, where he talks about the relationship of cause to negative things.

Particularly with medical negative backache and cancer causing, and heart attack, and so on. And he

says, now, if you're saying to yourself, well that's obvious, here's another word. But don't turn the page
until you've made some notes.

And interestingly enough, I did this to Mike Stubbs, but I knew he was right, of course, already. But I

didn't do my best to work out, as an informed linguist, what would be the case. And then he turned the

page, and there's still a lot facts that he'd found.

But of course I instantly recognised that I haven't been able to articulate out of my own consciousness.

So it is all subconscious knowledge.

Yes.

It has to be. I mean one of the big distinctions of course that Krashen makes is a distinction between

knowing the language and knowing about the language.

Yes.

And he argues that the knowing about can slow up the act of doing.

Yeah.

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And if you were conscious the whole time, you would actually be slowing up.

I think, again, sort of anecdotal, but a bit of evidence from my own life for that, is that I'm quite bad at

speaking foreign languages. Largely, I think, because of the way I was taught. I was taught in the 70s.

And it was the grammar translation method.

I had a grammar, I had a dictionary, and I was given translation tasks. And the process of translation for
me became highly analytical. Now of course it was great preparation for being a linguist. Because

picking up a grammar of Nepali doesn't bother me, or a dictionary of Nepali doesn't bother me, because

I've been trained that way.

Yeah, sure. Sure.

But in terms of preparing me for actually speaking in French or German, it was atrocious.

Yeah, I think I've been destroyed as a language learner by my own experiences. I mean, I from the

start I now know that my teachers didn't even pronounce certain words right when I learned French. But

crucially, it's all devoted to the written word.

And since I am slightly deaf, and have been probably all my life. Certainly my son is, and my father was,
so I probably was, too. And I wear hearing aids now.

It was obviously attractive to me, to focus on what we were being given in most quantity, which is the
written word. So I can read French, I can read Spanish, I can read Portuguese, I can write Chinese

characters. Indeed, I can write the speech in Chinese. But I can't actually engage in relaxed
conversation in any one of those languages.

Same with me with French and German. I've examined theses in the language. But everyday
conversation floors me very quickly.

Absolutely.

Because I start to think, where's my grammar? Where's my dictionary?

No, no it's ridiculous. I just literally yesterday finished reading a second of two articles in Portuguese.
And really didn't have any problem. I think it was about four words in the two articles I really needed to

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look up, just to check.

But if I was now to start this conversation in Portuguese with you, I'd sort of manage. But I'd manage

only by manipulating the situation. So I talked about things I knew, I could access my vocabulary.

Yes.

And the point is, I haven't really been primed sufficiently well for the spoken.

Yeah. It's very similar strategies. I remember from my French A-level oral exam-- I'd been to France by

hovercraft-- and I was determined to talk about going to France by hovercraft, because I'd swatted up

all the vocabulary for it. From set phrase, and things like that. And whatever they ask you, getting
around to talking about travelling on the hovercraft. It's the same strategy.

Yeah, exactly. That's right. Well I mean, Malcolm Coulthard used to say that learning-- he's a very fluent

speaker of Portuguese of course-- but he used to say that it turned him into a liar. Because it was

easier to say the things he knew he could say, rather than say things that were true.

Well that was fascinating. We travelled a little from collocation.

We did indeed.

So your book on this topic of is Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language by Michael

Hoey, Routledge, 2005?

2005, that's right.

Yeah? OK. Well I strongly recommend people to read that, because there are so many more ideas in

there than we've discussed today. But this has been absolutely fascinating, Mike. Thank you very much.

You're welcome.

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