Search

Historiographers of linguistics have typically claimed that by the 1970s, generative grammarians were organizationally dominant in the field of linguistics in the United States. I demonstrate that such is not true. To support my assertion, I present evidence based on who held LSA offices in the 1970s and 1980s, on what was published in the journal Language, on presentations at LSA meetings, on the composition of summer Linguistics Institutes, on grants awarded to linguists, and on jobs advertised in the field. My explanation for the lack of generative dominance is based on various factors, including the immaturity and diversity of the field of linguistics, on generative grammar not being a grant-dependent enterprise, and on the attitude toward the LSA exhibited by Chomsky and many of his closest co-thinkers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why is it preferable to say "salt and pepper" over "pepper and salt?" Based on an analysis of 692 binomial tokens from online corpora, we show that a number of semantic, metrical, and frequency constraints contribute significantly to ordering preferences, overshadowing the phonological factors that have traditionally been considered important. The ordering of binomials exhibits a considerable amount of variation. For example, although "principal and interest" is the more frequent order, "interest and principal" also occurs. We consider three frameworks for analysis of this variation: traditional optimality theory, stochastic optimality theory, and logistic regression. Our best models—using logistic regression—predict 79.2% of the binomial tokens and 76.7% of types, and the remainder are predicted as less frequent—but not ungrammatical—variants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]