#binomials — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #binomials, aggregated by home.social.
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There's this one paper published by the Chicago Linguistic Society in 1975 that I found years ago and really enjoy, World Order: http://websites.umich.edu/~jlawler/haj/worldorder.pdf
It describes the concept of irreversible #binomials (link) in #linguistics: words or #morphemes that come together and (often) have fixed positions. Things like:
- body and soul
- back and forth
- in and out
- ladies and gentlemen
- head and shoulders
- northwest
- north-south
- this and that
- good and evil
Which when reversed don't really work (usually):
- soul and body
- forth and back
- out and in
- gentlemen and ladies
- shoulders and head
- westnorth
- south-north
- that and this
- evil and good
Because certain cultural values determine #WordOrder: things that are close or high above, sex, age, friendliness, agentivity, living beings, divine beings, among many other things.
It's very interesting once you stop for a moment and think about it. And it differs slightly according to each language too. :blobfoxscience: