[5] 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.

"[8] 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".

[11] 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.

[13] 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 psycholiguists over a thirty year period".

[15][16] 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.)

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.

Hoey describes how these hypotheses were named as follows: "In the film Airplane!, we are told of a pilot who is no longer permitted to fly because he has a ‘drinking problem’.

He served, for instance, as a member of the West Midlands Arts Council, the President of a philatelic society, lay-preacher in his church.

[2][5][19] 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".