Can "hand in hand", "face to face", "miles and miles", "coast to coast" be considered "irreversible binomials"?
IRREVERSIBLE BINOMIALS - Irreversible binomial is a linguistic term coined by Yakov Malkiel in a 1959 article in the linguistics journal, Lingua, and refers to pairs of words on either side of a conjunction such as and that are always used in a particular order. For example, bread and butter, salt and vinegar, fish and chips, meat and potatoes, gin and tonic, time and tide, cloak and dagger, ladies and gentlemen, knife and fork, and head over heels.
A noun phrase consisting of two nouns joined by a conjunction, in which the conventional order is fixed. Examples include bread and butter and kith and kin. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/irreversible-binomial
Some so called "irreversible binomials", however, use the same word twice.
- hand in hand
- arm in arm
- face to face
- cheek to cheek
- louder and louder
- lower and lower
- on and on
- round and round
- miles and miles
- over and over
I've gone through a few lists of irreversible binomials where this kind is included. To me it makes no sense to call them "irreversible". Does it? Are they?
Irreversible binomials are defined as consisting of constituent A and constituent B
a subclass of coordinate constructions, viz. the coordination of two single words which belong to the same form class; examples would be hard and fast, or salt and pepper.
Per Arne Lohman's paper, A processing view on order in reversible and irreversible binomials (2012), the reason irreversible binomials take that form reflects syntactical reasons, e.g. where there exists selection pressure:
A certain order in extra-linguistic reality has been found to be reflected in the order of constituents (see Malkiel 1959, Benor & Levy 2006). This refers mostly to temporal order, e.g. birth and death, but may also refer to other scales, e.g. eighth and ninth.
A conjunction like less and less, in which there is no selection pressure, and which does not consist of two different words ordered in the same manner each time, does not meet the standard for an irreversible binomial. While all irreversible binomials are lexicalized units, not all lexicalized units are irreversible binomials.
I would say that binomials (if they are called that in linguistics) of the less and less and more and more types are a different kind of lexicalized unit.