Frozen Binomials on the Web: Word Ordering and Language Conventions in Online Text
Katherine Van Koevering, Austin R. Benson, Jon M. Kleinberg · 2020
There is inherent information captured in the order in which we write words in a list. The orderings of binomials — lists of two words separated by ‘and’ or ‘or’ — has been studied for more than a century. These binomials are common across many areas of speech, in both formal and informal text. In the last century, numerous explanations have been given to describe what order people use for these binomials, from differences in semantics to differences in phonology. These rules describe primarily ‘frozen’ binomials that exist in exactly one ordering and have lacked large-scale trials to determine efficacy.