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!
2
Eccentric @sh.itjust.works - 3mon
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?
2
Lvxferre [he/him] - 3mon
As if they were replacing some word, right? Except the word might not exist in this case.
cm0002 in linguistics
The English phrase-as-lemma construction: When a phrase masquerades as a word, people play along
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/962899That's interesting. I did some grammaticality tests, and my conclusion is that they behave a lot like nouns, but with further restrictions. Like this:
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:
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.