Pathways of Change in the Diachronic Development of Binomial Reversibility in Late Modern American English

Abstract

Binomials, coordinated pairs of words, differ as to their reversibility. However, the degree of reversibility of any binomial is not necessarily stable, but is subject to diachronic changes. This article hypothesizes the different pathways of change that a binomial’s degree of reversibility may follow and presents corpus findings to show that all these pathways, and more, do occur. Some 200 high-frequency binomials were analyzed regarding their degrees of reversibility in American English across the twenty decades from 1810 to 2009 using Google Books data. While the reversibility of a binomial may remain stable, changes in terms of freezing, unfreezing, and even order reversal are frequent and probably due to a combination of intra- and extralinguistic factors. The interaction between reversibility changes and frequency changes is discussed in light of usage-based approaches to language. The example of gender binomials shows that sociocultural changes may be reflected in linguistic changes.