Word order rules in business name binomials

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