Our everyday discourse is peppered with mini expressions known as binomials. They are engaging and rhythmic, and easily recalled; so much so that some have become a single entity of themselves such as ladies and gentlemen or bread and butter, while others are reversible or fluid such as night and day/day and night. Factors that contribute to the construction of word pairings are phonology and semantics, the balance beam of sound and rhythm versus its raison d'être. Some fixed binomial expressions have been seen to reverse over time from a rigid, fixed pairing to a fluid, mutable pair. The idea for this paper was prompted by a tweet that discussed the reversal of a previously fixed gender binomial —aunts and uncles began to change one hundred years ago from its earlier form of uncles and aunts. This binomial also had the audacity to flout the gender preference of the male lead, which made the phenomenon intriguing to follow. The aim of this paper is to look at particular word pairs, gendered and otherwise, to see how fixed or fluid they are over time, as well as to understand what determines change. The analysis includes previous research as well as corpus analysis to follow word pairs over time. Factors that contribute to change, particularly in gendered binomials, include politics and patriarchy, but perhaps more importantly, it is our own influence. Ultimately the balance is shifted by us; we affect change in our language through our discourse, pushing the lexical social influencers up the popularity ladder, giving the words in the first position an advantage in our collective memory through frequency, or in other words, cognitive accessibility.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hig-44944 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Twomey, Helen |
| Publisher | Högskolan i Gävle, Avdelningen för humaniora |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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