Cultural ingredients in Arabic lexical pairs (Binomials)

Abstract

“Irreversible binomials” or “lexical pairs” are word pairs that occur always or almost always in a specific order: bread and butter, to and fro. Such pairs exist in Arabic, and a typological characteristic can be identified: positive before negative. The article largely provides a contrastive analysis with English practice.

Keywords:

• Arabic
• Lexical pairs
• Irreversible binomials