Salt and pepper revisited

[Patricia Cukor-Avila]

Another source on this topic is Cooper and Ross's 1975 CLS paper "World Order".  They call these constructions "freezes".  Check the ADS-L archives for a discussion several years ago (Feb. 2-3 1996) about freezes.

Tricia

>>> laurence.horn at YALE.EDU 05/25/05 11:31 AM >>>
I just downloaded and took a quick look at this, but it seems to be
directly relevant to our discussion and has a very comprehensive
bibliography on freezes or irreversible binomials:

Wright, Saundra, Jennifer Hay & Tessa Bent (2005).  Ladies first?
Phonology, frequency, and the naming conspiracy.  Linguistics 43:
531-61.

While the authors look at various factors--semantic, social, and
phonological--that conspire to put male names first in two-name
sequences, they also discuss the phenomenon in more general terms,
with lots of statistical support.  Along the way (p. 534) they note
that:

========
English displays a strong preference for alternating beats (Selkirk
1984).  These beats are organized into a trochaic foot structure, and
feet are generally aligned to the left (e.g. Hayes 1995)...[T]he
optimal phrasing for a binominal expression should be one that
preserves an alternating, preferably trochaic, stress structure.  For
example, salt and pepper displays perfect trochaic structure.
However, pepper and salt does not.
========

and so on.  This paper would seem to be the first place to look for
anyone toiling in these green and growing (#growing and green) fields.

Larry