Lexicography, grammar, and textual position

The relationship between lexis and grammatical pattern is generally recognized to be more complex than was once thought; this complexity includes the association of word sense with favoured or dispreferred syntactic patterns. Modern learner dictionaries accordingly contain a great deal of information about the grammatical contexts in which words characteristically appear. Recent work on lexical priming theory suggests that there is an equally complex relationship between lexis and textual position. This paper reports a corpus investigation of the lexis of the initial sentences of newspaper reports. We show that naturalness in text is not just a product of the choice of collocations and grammatical pattern but depends with equal force on the choice of lexis primed for the appropriate textual position.