Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Naming practices offer a window onto linguistic processes of productivity that rely on input from interacting streamsof information. Previous studies have looked at proper personal names and binomial combinations of proper personal names toshow that phonological features such as rhythm, semantic features such as gender, and corpus features such as word frequencyplay an important role in naming and ordering of names. In comparison to personal names, business names tend to be morediverse in terms of constituent structure, often incorporating binomial constructions that may or may not consist of proper namesthemselves. In this study, we investigate whether the ordering of binomials in business names reflects the features identifiedin previous work, with a focus on the following: syllable count, metrical stress, animacy, concreteness, word frequency, andbinomial frequency. We report here on an initial analysis of data from the Yelp Dataset Challenge.