Michael Hoey (1948-2020) was a British linguist and Professor of English Language at the University of Liverpool whose work brought together corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, and lexical theory with unusual force. He is best known for lexical priming, but he also belongs to that generation of scholars who helped make corpus-informed thinking intellectually unavoidable.
Hoey had a talent for noticing that what looked like isolated grammatical choice was often the afterlife of repeated lexical experience. He did not merely add another vocabulary theory to the shelf; he made the shelf wobble.