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.

Our goal is to present, by means of the detailed analysis of a single grammatical problem, some of the principal commitments and mechanisms of a grammatical theory that assigns a central role to the notion of grammatical construction. To adopt a constructional approach is to undertake a commitment in principle to account for the entirety of each language. This means that the relatively general patterns of the language, such as the one licensing the ordering of a finite auxiliary verb before its subject in English, often known as SAI, and the highly idiomatic patterns, like kick the bucket, stand on an equal footing as data for which the grammar must account. An explicit grammar that covers the full range of constructions must represent all constructions, of whatever degree of generality or idiomaticity, in a common notation and must provide an explicit account of how each sentence of a language is licensed by a subset of the leaves of the inheritance hierarchy of constructions which constitutes the grammar of that language. Language-internal generalizations are captured by inheritance relations among constructions. Cross-language generalizations are captured by the architecture of the representation system and by the sharing of abstract constructions across languages. The particular grammatical phenomenon used here to introduce construction grammar (CG) is the construction that licenses the surprising syntactic and semantic features of a sentence like What are they doing resuscitating constructions?

In this discussion note we argue against the findings presented in Hay & Bauer 2007, which show a positive correlation between population size and phoneme inventory size. We argue that the positive correlation is an artifact of the authors’ statistical technique and biased data set. Using a hierarchical mixed model to account for genealogical relatedness of languages, and a much larger and more diverse sample of the world’s languages, we find little support for population size as an explanatory predictor of phoneme inventory size once the genealogical relatedness of languages is accounted for.