As an avid (ab)user of phrases-as-lemmata, I found this interesting.
Discovered through YouTube: Linguists just made a breakthrough in defining a 'word. ’ No, really
That’s interesting. I did some grammaticality tests, and my conclusion is that they behave a lot like nouns, but with further restrictions. Like this:
Sentence a. “we’re-better-than-you” (PAL) b. “arrogant” (adj.) c. “arrogance” (n.) 1. Their [__] behaviour is annoying. OK OK OK 2. Their [__] is annoying OK? bad OK 3. They [__] fairly often bad bad bad I’m not a native speaker, mind you. I feel like 2a (“Their we’re-better-than-you is annoying.”) is kind of passable? It doesn’t sound as malformed as using 3a (trying to force the PAL into a verb position), but it sounds worse than 1a. I wonder if native speakers agree or disagree with this.
The text does mention Portuguese (my L1) also allows PALs, so I repeated the tests:
Sentence a. “somos-melhores-que-vocês” (PAL) b. “arrogante” (adj.) c. “arrogância” (n.) 4. O comportamento [__] deles é irritante. bad OK bad 5. O comportamento de [__] deles é irritante. OK ? OK 6. (O/A) [__] deles é irritante. OK (with “o”) bad OK (with “a”) 7. Eles [__] constantemente. bad bad bad 4a sounds extremely broken, even if its English equivalent (1a) sounds OK. That makes sense if they’re behaving like nouns - unlike English, Portuguese doesn’t allow nouns to directly modify each other. I’d also probably give 5b a pass but, again, language specificities - it’s easier to promote an adjective to a noun in Portuguese than in English.
Interesting share regardless of the above - thanks for sharing it!
To me as a native speaker, 1c is ungrammatical. I do agree that 2a is surprisingly grammatical though.
I will say grammar is really not my strong suit (and I only had time to skim the paper) but I have a decent background in semantics. Maybe I’ve just been working a lot with euphemisms lately, but PALs almost seem to function like euphemisms?
As if they were replacing some word, right? Except the word might not exist in this case.
