Over the past few days, I've been reading Michael Hoey's Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language (amazon.com) and it has been very thought-provoking. My friend Randall Tan pointed me to the book and has invited me to work with him on a paper based on sections of Hoey's book for the upcoming International SBL meeting in Vienna. Here's the abstract of the paper, which has been accepted for presentation in the "Hellenistic Greek Language and Linguistics" section:

In his provocative study, Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language (amazon.com) (Routledge, 2005), Michael Hoey argues for a new theory of the lexicon. Hoey's claim is that words and sequences of words that we learn are cumulatively loaded with the contexts and co-texts in which we encountered them and that grammar is the result of our recognition of recurrent features in this "lexical priming." In effect, his theory reverses the roles of lexis and grammar, proposing that "lexis is complexly and systematically structured and that grammar is an outcome of this lexical structure" (1).

In this paper, one of Hoey’s specific claims will be examined: “When a word is polysemous, the collocations, semantic associations and colligations of one sense of the word differ from those of its other senses” (13). Specific words and word groups (including sequences of words involving controversial genitive constructions) in the Greek New Testament will be explored with corpus linguistic techniques, using newly available syntactically-tagged Greek New Testament databases (i.e., the online OpenText.org annotation and the Logos implementation of OpenText.org as well as the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament). The dual goal is to verify the extent to which Hoey’s claim can be substantiated and to propose new avenues to adjudicate interpretational controversies.

Hoey's book is not about Hellenistic Greek, all of his examples are based on a 98 million word corpus composed largely of material from the Guardian Newspaper from 1991-1994. So this means you need to understand some basic grammar and not be afraid of linguistic terminology. However, Hoey writes well and the book is approachable by, I'd guess, just about anyone with an interest in grammar and linguistics. You don't have to have much linguistic background to really get into what Hoey is proposing.