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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Sarah Bunin Benor and
Roger Levy
Sarah Bunin Benor*
Affiliation:
Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion
Roger Levy*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
*
Benor, Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute of Religion, 3077 University Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90007, [sbenor@huc.edu]
Levy, University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics, 2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, United Kingdom, [rlevy@inf.ed.ac.uk]
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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.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 82 , Issue 2 , June 2006, pp. 233 - 278
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 by Linguistic Society of America

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