Michael Hoey

Michael Hoey (24 February 1948 – 10 September 2021) was a British linguist and Baines Professor of English Language. He lectured in applied linguistics in over 40 countries.

Early life Michael Peter Hoey was born in Preston in 1948, the son of Charles Hoey, a chemical engineer, and his wife, Mary. He grew up in Hemel Hempstead, where the family had moved to when he was very young. He began studying Law at UCL but felt that the subject did not appeal to his interest in people and how they form identities. He soon realised that his real interests lay elsewhere, and transferred to a degree in English. His interest in the English language was stimulated by the tuition of the celebrated linguist Sir Randolph Quirk. He met Sue Ward, a fellow student, whom he married in 1971. They had two children, Alice and Richard. the first-ever corpus-driven dictionary. "Without realising it," Hoey relates, "I was slowly mutating into a corpus linguist."

Hoey was appointed Baines Professor of English Language in 1993, at the University of Liverpool. He was the Director of the Applied English Language Studies Unit between 1993 and 2003, and between 2008 and 2009 he was Dean of the University's Faculty of Arts. He also served as Director of Curriculum Development. In 2010, he became Pro-Vice-Chancellor International.

Hoey was co-editor of a series of books on corpus linguistics published by Routledge, and also served as the chief adviser on the Macmillan English Dictionary, for which he also wrote the foreword. His administrative roles have included Chair of the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance's English Committee. He lectured in 40 countries and had visited 100.

Themes Hoey's work has been described as being "about texts, not isolated words or even words within a sentence." In 2007, Hans-Jörg Schmid wrote that Hoey "has long made himself a name as a keen promoter of a lexical approach to text analysis and text linguistics in general... Hoey has produced a number of influential publications in this area."

According to Alan Partington, much of Hoey's early work appeared "in conjunction with Eugene Winter and was dealing with discourse above the level of the sentence". Crucially, "the clauses ... of a discourse are related semantically, across clauses, sentences and paragraphs, even across different texts in a limited number of ways.

Main publications On The Surface of Discourse (1983) focuses single semantic markers that are to be found intra-textual as well as inter-textual.

The Lexical Priming theory Starting with a paper given in 1997 on colligation, Hoey developed the theory of Lexical Priming as a means to pull together ideas with regards to discourses and text cohesion elements he had investigated in his earlier books. From 2003 onwards, he looked at evidence of lexical priming in newspaper texts, focussed on textual positions of words and phrases (which became an AHRC-funded project in 2007) and looked at it in the light of creativity and, in many talks given, as a key to revolutionizing the teaching of English as a foreign language. In his own words: "Lexical priming is a theory intended to account for the existence of corpus linguistic phenomena such as collocation and colligation that cannot be explained in terms of logic or theoretical grammars of the generative kind. The explanation offered avoids circularity because it is not based on the data it seeks to explain but on work of psycholinguists over a thirty year period".

Michael Pace-Sigge has shown that the theory has foundations in psycholinguistics going back to the 1960s - in particular, work by Michael R. Quillian (1969) and James Neely (1976). In short, Hoey sums up the lexical priming theory as follows: "each encounter we have with a recurrent piece of language (word, phrase, morpheme etc.) primes us to recognise and reproduce the encountered piece of language, thereby also ensuring its continued recurrence. Since the recurrence subconsciously noted may be a replicated grammatical context or recognition of a shared semantics or reference, the reproduction need not be mechanical." This is also compatible with notions of creativity as existing notions of a word (or set of words) are either re-assigned or a speaker /writer deliberately seeks to be in breach of the expectation of their audience.

The drinking-problem-hypotheses This was first published in 1997. Hoey describes how these hypotheses were named as follows:

Thus the hypotheses are Where it can be shown that a common sense of a polysemous word is primed to favour certain collocations, semantic associations and/or colligations, the rarer sense of the word will be primed to avoid these. … Where two senses of a word are approximately as common as each other, they will both avoid each other’s collocations, semantic associations and/or colligations. Where either (1) or (2) do not apply, the effect will be humour, ambiguity (momentarily or permanent), or a new meaning combining the two sentences.

Outside Interests Beyond the confines of academia, his interests were extraordinarily wide. He served, for instance, as a member of the West Midlands Arts Council, the President of a philatelic society, lay-preacher in his church. He was editor of a Campaign for Real Ale Society publication (called ‘Ale and Hearty’).

Appraisal Patterns of Lexis in Text (1991): awarded the Duke of Edinburgh English-Speaking Union Prize for the best book on Applied Linguistics in 1991. Lexical Priming (2005): shortlisted for the BAAL Prize for best book in applied linguistics. Professor Dinah Birch of Liverpool University describes him in 2021 as having been an "exceptionally thoughtful and devoted teacher and supervisor, and many students owe a great deal to his generously-shared expertise". Alan Partington, also in 2021, recalled Hoey's “lecturing style was vibrant, their content always thought-provoking."