摘要：Lexical Priming Theory claims that the collocational primings of a word depend on the genre or discipline in which it occurs. In this study, attempts were made to compare the collocates of two nouns (group, theory) and the positions of the collocates prior and subsequent to the node word in two specialized corpora of soft sciences and ESP textbooks in Iran to see if they are realized in the same or different ways. To serve this purpose, two corpora were compiled. Then, two nouns which enjoyed high frequency in the corpora were selected. The Word Smith Tools software was employed to detect the first 15 collocates of the nouns and the frequencies of their occurrences in 10 possible positions prior and subsequent to the node word. The findings demonstrated some remarkable discrepancies across the corpora. Nouns tend to collocate with different words, especially content words, in the Iranian ESP textbooks in comparison to the original texts. Furthermore, it was found that these collocates are positions specific. To put it differently, collocates of a word tend to occur in or avoid certain positions in different disciplines. The same also unfolded in the ESP corpus.
