Varying Lexical Priming in English and Persian Fiction: A Case Study

The main purpose of this research was to describe and detect the lexical priming in the text, a less-often-noticed aspect of the text structure. The research was based on theHoey's Lexical priming theory. Lexical priming differs according to the text genre and also differs from language to language. In order to detect the differences in lexicalpriming patterns in English and Persian literary text, the researcher analysed a text from narrative genre, The Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway, to find the lexical chain in the text. Then the equivalent lexical chains of the Persian translationwere extracted and compared with the LCs (Lexical Chains) in the source text. The researcher found various instances of shifts which fall under four categories: a) deletionshift, b) multiple equivalent shift, c) pro-nominalization shift, and d) nominalization shift. Based on the data, the result of this research indicated that lexis in Englishnarrative genre are primed for simple repetition and co-reference, while Persian isagainst maintaining high level of lexical repetition and compensate it by the means of deletion, synonyms(multiple equivalent), and nominalization.

کلیدواژه ها:

Lexical priming ، Lexical chain (LC) ، Shift