Abstract
There are times when a curiously odd relic of language presents us with a thread, which when pulled, reveals deep and general facts about human language. This paper unspools such a case. Prior to 1930, English speakers uniformly preferred male-before-female word order in conjoined nouns such as uncles and aunts; nephews and nieces; men and women. Since then, at least a half dozen items have systematically reversed their preferred order (e.g., aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews) while others have not (men and women). We review evidence that the unusual reversals began with mother and dad(dy) and spread to semantically and morphologically related binomials over a period of decades. The present work proposes that three aspects of cognitive accessibility combine to quantify the probability of A&B order: (1) the relative accessibility of the A&B terms individually, (2) competition from B&A order, and critically, (3) cluster strength (i.e., similarity to related A'&B' cases). The emergent cluster of female-first binomials highlights the influence of semantic neighborhoods in memory retrieval. We suggest that cognitive accessibility can be used to predict the word order of both familiar and novel binomials generally, as well as the diachronic change focused on here.
Highlights
Before the 1930s, English speakers systematically preferred the following word orders when using pairs of common nouns referring to male and female entities: uncle and aunt, nephew and niece, pa and ma, grandpa and grandma, father and mother, grandfathers and grandmothers
We suggest a unified account of binomial orderings based on the cognitive accessibility of the parts and the whole, where cognitive accessibility refers to the speed or ease with which concepts are retrieved from memory (Tulving and Pearlstone, 1966; see Ferreira and Dell, 2000; MacDonald, 2013)
“accessibility” is not often mentioned in work on historical change, nor even in work on binomial word order, we argue that a particular gendered binomial (A&B) order is predicted by the relative accessibility of the parts (A vs. B) and the degree of competition from the alternative order (B&A)
Summary
Before the 1930s, English speakers systematically preferred the following word orders when using pairs of common nouns referring to male and female entities: uncle and aunt, nephew and niece, pa and ma, grandpa and grandma, father and mother, grandfathers and grandmothers. These orderings all reflected a preference to produce the male term first, a preference which remains generally operative today (Levy, 2005; Wright et al, 2005; Lohmann and Takada, 2014; Iliev and Smirnova, 2016; Tachihara and Goldberg, 2021). “Pa and ma” shows the shift to ma and pa order as early as 1950 (top); “fathers and mothers” displays a reversed preference of mothers and fathers by roughly 1970 (middle), and “nephews and nieces” shows the preference reversal by the mid 1970s (bottom)
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