Is Bonnie (syntactically) more important than Clyde?
"Bonnie and Clyde" is an example of a coordinate structure. In most linguistic constructions, one of the words largely determines syntactic and semantic features of the entire construction; for example, in the construction "American criminals active during Great Depression", this most important word is the noun "criminals". But what is the most important word in the construction "Bonnie and Clyde"? There is no consensus in linguistics as to the internal structure of such constructions – there are many "asymmetric" theories, which say that the first component (here: “Bonnie”) is the most important one, and many "symmetric" theories, which assume the syntactic equality of both components (here: the equality of “Bonnie” and “Clyde”).
In an article accepted for this year's Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics – the most important and largest conference on computational linguistics – a professor of linguistics from the Institute of Computer Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the University of Warsaw, together with a student of cognitive science at the University of Warsaw – presented a new argument for symmetric theories of coordinate structures. This argument is based on automatic processing of large collections of texts, in this case English texts, and on advanced statistical analysis of extracted linguistic data. Work is currently underway to obtain similar results based on data from languages other than English, but the question in the title of this note can already be answered in the negative: at least in English, Bonnie is not (syntactically) more important than Clyde: they are (syntactically) equal.
The article is available on the publisher website: ACL Antology (Open Access).