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The Chicken or the Egg? A Probabilistic Analysis of English Binomials
- Language
- Linguistic Society of America
- Volume 82, Number 2, June 2006
- pp. 233-278
- 10.1353/lan.2006.0077
- Article
- Additional Information
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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.