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The Chicken or the Egg? A Probabilistic Analysis of English Binomials
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Benor, Sarah Bunin Levy, Sarah |
| Copyright Year | 2006 |
| Abstract | Why is it preferable to say salt and pepper over pepper and salt? Based on an analysis of 692 binomial tokens from online corpora, we show that a number of semantic, metrical, and frequency constraints contribute significantly to ordering preferences, overshadowing the phonological factors that have traditionally been considered important. The ordering of binomials exhibits a considerable amount of variation. For example, although principal and interest is the more frequent order, interest and principal also occurs. We consider three frameworks for analysis of this variation: traditional optimality theory, stochastic optimality theory, and logistic regression. Our best models—using logistic regression—predict 79.2% of the binomial tokens and 76.7% of types, and the remainder are predicted as less frequent—but not ungrammatical—variants. |
| Starting Page | 233 |
| Ending Page | 278 |
| Page Count | 46 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1353/lan.2006.0077 |
| Volume Number | 82 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://idiom.ucsd.edu/~rlevy/papers/binomials-accepted.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2006.0077 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
