The Chicken or the Egg? A Probabilistic Analysis of English Binomials

By S. Benor, Roger Levy. Language, 2006

213 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ec5c9feda61bb72729155e4a6d0692c7f3dc24c6

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Citations in the corpus

Is Man the Measure of All Things? A Social Cognitive Account of Androcentrism (2018, background): “In addition, recent linguistic corpus analyses, assessing large repositories of written and spoken language, found that word order was not strongly predicted by metrical and phonemic features of the words (Benor & Levy, 2006; Mollin, 2014).”
Learning to order words: A connectionist model of heavy NP shift and accessibility effects in Japanese and English (2009, background): “It is often thought that the order of items in a conjunction can be predicted from lexical properties of the component words (Benor & Levy, 2006; McDonald et al., 1993; Pinker & Birdsong, 1979), but since the division into ‘‘original” and ‘‘reverse” order was arbitrary, this account would predict…”
Symbol Interdependency in Symbolic and Embodied Cognition (2011, background): “An explanation for this finding is that because humans typically view the world from top to bottom, language has encoded this so that words describing concepts at the top precede those describing concepts at the bottom (Benor & Levy, 2006).”
Cognitive Corpus Linguistics: five points of debate on current theory and methodology (2010, background): “Another possible application would be to measure production times in binomial expressions such as brothers and sisters, sing and dance or cold and wet, which display a preferred ordenng that can be reversed (Benor and Levy, 2006).”