Stable Coordinate Pairs in Spanish: Statistical and Structural Description

Stable coordinate pairs (SCP) like comentarios y sugerencias ‘comments and suggestions’ or sano y salvo ‘safe and sound’ are rather frequent in texts in Spanish, though there are only few thousands of them in language. We characterize SCPs statistically by a numerical Stable Connection Index and reveal its unimodal distribution. We also propose lexical, morphologic, syntactic, and semantic categories for SCP structural description — for both a whole SCP and its components. It is argued that database containing a set of categorized SCPs facilitates several tasks of automatic NLP.. The research is based on a set of ca. 2200 Spanish coordinate pairs.