Mollin Sandra. The (Ir)reversibility of English Binomials: Corpus, constraints, developments

John Benjamins, 2014. — 264 pages. — (Studies in Corpus Linguistics, Book 64). — ISBN: 978-90-272-6953-9.This book focuses on binomials (word pairs such as heart and soul, rich and poor, or if and when), and in particular on the degree of reversibility that English binomials demonstrate.Detailed and innovative corpus linguistic analyses investigate the correlates of the degree of reversibility, linguistic constraints that influence the ordering and reversibility of binomials and the diachronic development of reversibility. In addition, judgment data are analyzed for their convergence and divergence with corpus data regarding degrees of reversibility. The book thus establishes reversibility as a complex characteristic of the binomial construction, at the same time throwing light on general questions in phraseology, lexicalization, language structure and language processing.On binomials
Defiition and terminology
Previous foci of research
The (ir)reversibility of binomials in previous research
Classifying binomials
The (ir)reversibility of binomials in the English language: A corpus-based analysis
Corpus methodology
Binomials in the English language
Th reversibility of English binomialsOrdering constraints and the reversibility of English binomials
Ordering constraints in previous works
An empirical study into the predictive power of ordering constraints
The relationship between ordering constraint adherence and binomial reversibilityThe diachronic development of binomials and binomial reversibility
Binomials in the history of English
Pathways of change in the development of binomial reversibilityBinomial reversibility in the mental lexicon: Native and non-native speakers’ judgments of degrees of reversibility
Binomial reversibility in native-speaker judgments
Binomial reversibility in non-native-speaker judgments
Summary and outlookAppendix: Binomials analysed