The tendency to reuse syntactic constructions is often attributed to

syntactic priming. We devise a simple, distribution-based measure of

priming between linguistic constructions (or syntactic

rules/categories), and find priming in treebanks of dialogue corpora,

both for context-free production rules and for Combinatory Categorial

Grammar categories. It is stronger for task-oriented dialogues, and

stronger in lexical categories than in syntactic categories.

As priming cannot be measured directly in language corpora, we use the

decay of rule repetition probability as a proxy. A limitation of the

method presented here is that it conflates self-priming and

other-priming. However, we consider it a great advantage that our

method takes into account all rules or categories occurring in a given

corpus, not just a few carefully selected constructions.