Syntactic Priming over Clusters of Noun Phrases

This thesis introduces the concept of syntactic cross-priming: priming between nonidentical syntactic rules, analogous to lexical association. I also present the hypothesis that cross-priming is related to similarity, to the effect that pairs more similar rules will have higher cross-priming strengths. I introduce a variant of adaptation, crossadaptation as a measure for cross-priming in a corpus of written text, and show that high cross-adaptation correlates with similarity metrics. In addition, I present two attempts at clustering rules into clusters of high similarity and cross-priming.