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Time in Languages, Languages in Time
Edited by Anna Čermáková, Thomas Egan, Hilde Hasselgård and Sylvi Rørvik
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 101] 2021
► pp. 39–66

Diachronic change in the ordering of kinship binomials

A contrastive perspective

| Charles University, Prague

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
Published online: 17 September 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.101.03cer
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Čermáková, Anna & Michaela Mahlberg
2021. The representation of mothers and the gendered social structure of nineteenth-century children’s literature. English Text Construction 14:2 ► pp. 119 ff. DOI logo

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