Diachronic change in the ordering of kinship binomials
A contrastive perspective
One of the specific characteristics of binomials is the ordering of their elements and the degree of their reversibility. A
diachronic perspective suggests it is particularly the kinship binomials that show a strong unfreezing trend away from the
male-first ordering. This study explores, diachronically and from an English-Czech contrastive perspective, kinship binomials
in children’s literature. It confirms earlier findings of a gradual diachronic reversal of term ordering in kinship
binomials that extends across languages. However, at the same time, binomial sequencing seems to be a complex interplay of
linguistic, cognitive and real-world influences. The diachronic reversal of preference in the ordering is limited to
particular binomials and may be linked to a more general change in the discourse, namely the shift towards greater
informality.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.On binomials and kinship terms
- 3.Data and method
- 4.Diachronic development of English kinship terms
- 4.1Kinship binomials in the 19th century children’s literature
- 4.2Kinship terms in contemporary children’s books
- 5.Diachronic development of Czech kinship terms
- 6.Extended cross-linguistic perspective
- 7.Conclusions
-
Acknowldegements
-
Notes
-
References
References
Abrahams, Richard D.
1950 Fixed order of
coordinates: A study in comparative lexicography.
The Modern Language
Journal 34(4): 276–287.
Benor, Sarah Bunin & Levy, Roger
2006 The
chicken or the egg? A probabilistic analysis of English
binomials.
Language 82(2): 233–277.
Čermák, František
2010 Binomials:
Their nature in Czech and in general. In
Phraseologie global
– areal – regional. Akten der Konferenz EUROPHRAS 2008,
Jarmo Korhonen,
Wolfgang Mieder,
Elisabeth Piirainen &
Rosa Piñel (eds), 309–315. Tübingen: Narr.
Čermáková, Anna
2017.
The GLARE 19th Century Children’s Literature Corpus in CLiC [Blog
post].
[URL] (1 October 2019).
Čermáková, Anna
2018
ChiLit: The GLARE 19th Century Children’s Literature Corpus in CLiC [Blog
post].
[URL] (1 October 2019).
Čermáková, Anna & Chlumská, Lucie
Chaloupka, Otakar & Voráček, Jaroslav
1979 Kontury
české literatury pro děti a
mláděž. Praha: Albatros.
Cooper, William E. & Ross, John Robert
1975 World
order. In
Functionalism,
Robin E. Grossman,
L. James San &
Timothy J. Vance (eds), 63–111. Chicago IL: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Craig, Lyn
2016 Contemporary
Motherhood: The Impact of Children on Adult
Time. London: Routledge.
Croft, William
2003 Typology
and
Universals. Cambridge: CUP.
Danet, Brenda
1985.
Legal
discourse. In
Handbook of Discourse
Analysis,
Teun A. Van Dijk (ed.), 273–291. London: Academia Press.
Ebeling, Jarle & Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell
Giammarresi, Salvatore
2010 Formulaicity
and translation: A cross-corpora analysis of English formulaic binomials and their Italian
translations. In
Perspectives on Formulaic Language:
Acquisition and Communications,
David Wood (ed.), 257–74. London: Bloomsbury.
Gustaffson, Marita
1975 Binomial
Expressions in Present-Day English. A Syntactic and Semantic
Study. Turku: Turun Yliopisto.
Hegarty, Peter, Watson, Nila, Fletcher, Laura & McQueen, Grant
2011 When
gentlemen are first and ladies are last: Effects of gender stereotypes on the order of romantic partners’
names.
British Journal of Social
Psychology 50(1): 21–35.
Hiltunen, Risto
1990 Chapters
on Legal English: Aspects Past and Present of the Language of the
Law. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia.
Iliev, Rumen & Smirnova, Anastasia
2016 Revealing
word order: Using serial position in binomials to predict properties of the
speaker.
Journal of Psycholinguistic
Research 45(2): 205–235.
Jerrim, John & Moss, Gemma
2019 The
link between fiction and teenagers’ reading skills: International evidence from the OECD PISA
study.
British Educational Research
Journal 45(1): 181–200.
Jespersen, Otto
1905 Growth
and Structure of the English
Language. Leipzig: Teubner.
Klégr, Aleš & Čermák, Jan
2008 Binomials
in an historical English literary perspective: Shakespeare, Chaucer,
Beowulf. In
Shakespeare between the Middle Ages and
Modernity: From Translator’s Art to Academic Discourse. A Tribute to Professor Martin
Hilský,
Aleš Klégr,
Jan Čermák &
Martin Procházka (eds). Prague: Charles University.
Kopaczyk, Joanna & Sauer, Hans
2017 Binomials
in the History of English. Fixed and
Flexible. Cambridge: CUP.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude
1949 Les
Structures élémentaires de la
parenté. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
Lohmann, Arne
2014 English
Coordinate Constructions: A Processing Perspective on Constituent
Order. Cambridge: CUP.
Love, Robbie, Dembry, Claire, Hardie, Andrew, Brezina, Vaclav & McEnery, Tony
Lohmann, Arne & Takada, Tayo
2014 Order
in NP conjuncts in spoken English and
Japanese.
Lingua 152: 48–64.
Malkiel, Yakov
1959 Studies
in irreversible
binomials.
Lingua 8: 113–160.
Moon, Rosamund
1998 Fixed
Expressions and Idioms in
English. Oxford: Clarendon.
Morgan, Emily & Levy, Roger
2016 Abstract
knowledge versus direct experience in processing of binomial
expressions.
Cognition 157: 384–402.
Motschenbacher, Heiko
2013 Gentlemen
before ladies? A corpus-based study of conjunct order in personal binomials.
Journal of
English
Linguistics 41(3): 212–42.
Onishi, Kristine H., Murphy, Gregory L. & Bock, Kathryn
2008 Prototypicality
in sentence production.
Cognitive
Psychology 56(2): 103–141.
Pordány, László
1986 Irreversible
binomials in Hungarian.
Acta Linguistica Academiae Scientiarum
Hungaricae 36(1-4): 151–79.
Reynolds, Kim
2011 Children’s
Literature: A Very Short
Introduction. Oxford: OUP.
Siyanova-Chantura, Anna, Conklin, Kathy & van Heuven, Walter J. B.
2011 Seeing a phrase time
and again matters: The role of phrasal frequency in the processing of multiword
sequences.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and
Cognition 37(3): 776–784.
Sobkowiak, Włodzimierz
1993 Unmarked-before-marked
as a freezing principle.
Language and
Speech 36(4): 393–414.
Tachihara, Karina & Goldberg, Adele E.
2019 Cognitive
accessibility predicts word order of couples’ names in English and Japanese.
Cognitive
Linguistics.
Wright, Saundra & Hay, Jennifer
2002 Fred
and Wilma: A phonological conspiracy. In
Gendered Practices
in Language,
Sarah Benor,
Mary Rose,
Devyani Sharma,
Julie Sweetland &
Quing Zhang (eds), 175–91. Stanford CA: CSLI.
Wright, Saundra K., Hay, Jennifer & Bent, Tessa
2005 Ladies
first? Phonology, frequency, and the naming
conspiracy.
Linguistics 43(3): 531–561.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Čermáková, Anna & Michaela Mahlberg
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.