Word Order Of English And Chinese Nominal Binomials: A Diachronic Perspective

Scholars and laymen alike have worked on word order of binomials for decades due to its intricacy of sequencing patterns.Binomial,also called coordinating phrase,refers to sequence of two words which belong to the same form-class,and put on the same syntactic hierarchy.Scholars at home and abroad have synchronically focused on the sequencing of binomials,especially freezes,and proposed a great number of phonological,metrical,semantic and cognitive rules to account for the fixed ordering preferences.Results of data analysis suggest that freezes which are completely irreversible are only a small category of binomials and other categories with varying reversibility degrees have been neglected in the literature.In particular,the issue whether English and Chinese nominal binomials have undergone historical changes in ordering preferences remains unexplored.Therefore,in order to elaborate on the pathways of changes in binomials,methodologies including synchrony and diachrony,comparison and contrast,description and explanation,are adopted in the thesis.Based on synchronic corpora(COCA and CCL),diachronic corpora(COHA,Google Books Corpus,CCL)and dictionaries(OED and CCD),the research categorizes both freezes and other binomials with varying reversibility degrees,and investigates the distribution patterns of binomials along the reversibility cline and the diachronic development of reversibility degrees.Kendall's tau(?)is adopted to examine the correlation between the irreversibility scores and time variable and identify the diachronic pathways of changes in word order.The data analysis suggests that binomials with highly preferred order account for the largest proportion in both English and Chinese binomials.Chinese binomials,especially unmarked binomials,display higher degrees of irreversibility and idiomaticity than English binomials.With six diachronic patterns,English binomials display more dynamic trends than Chinese binomials.The majority of Chinese unmarked binomials,however,show relatively static patterns of change in reversibility,and a small proportion displays freezing and unfreezing trends.The thesis then traces the potential ordering motivations for English and Chinese nominal binomials from both linguistic and extra-linguistic perspectives and both universals and variations are manifested.In addition to linguistic factors including markedness,idiomaticity,and phonological factor,word ordering is also cognitively,socially,culturally and cross-linguistically motivated.Word order of binomials,even freezes,however,may be reversed by language users when the metrical,semantic and cognitive structures shown in the binomial contradict with those in the context.