Binomials are coordinated word pairs, such as rich and famous. They are characterized by their degree of reversibility, i.e. whether they allow both possible sequences (‘A and B’ as well as ‘B and A’) to equal degrees, prefer one sequence over the other to differing degrees, or allow only one sequence. While the phenomenon of binomial reversibility has been studied synchronically (Malkiel 1959, Gustafsson 1976, Mollin 2012), diachronic studies are so far lacking. This may be because a sufficiently large corpus (with sufficient frequencies for these infrequent lexical items) has only recently become available in the form of the Google Books n-gram data, whose American English subdatabase (155 billion words), divided into decades from the 1810s to the 2000s, was used here. Some 250 binomials, all of which are highly frequent in contemporary American English, were studied regarding the development of their reversibility (calculated as the relative frequencies of both sequences).
A large number of different patterns emerge from the data. Some are static, suggesting that changes may have preceded the time span covered in the corpus. However, a surprisingly large number of binomials (53%) exhibit changes: we find freezing towards a stronger preference, but also unfreezing towards greater reversibility. A number of binomials have even changed their preferred order during the past 200 years, such as mother and father. Moreover, it is shown for new binomials that fluctuations in reversibility are common for a few decades before a stable stage is reached. While some binomials’ changes can be explained in terms of the development of the prevalence of their referents in society, the majority cannot, suggesting general inner-linguistic mechanisms of language change. An integration into existing frameworks of lexical change (especially Brinton & Traugott’s (2005) lexicalization) will thus be attempted.
Brinton, Laurel J. & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2005. Lexicalization and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gustafsson, Marita. 1976. "The frequency and "frozenness" of some English binomials." In: Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 77, 623-637.
Malkiel, Yakov. 1959. "Studies in irreversible binomials." In: Lingua 8, 113-160.
Mollin, Sandra. 2012. "Revisiting binomial order in English: Ordering constraints and reversibility." In: English Language and Linguistics 16: 1, 79-101.