The English Phrase-As-Lemma Construction: When a Phrase Masquerades as a Word, People Play Along

This article examines the English phrase - as - lemma (PAL) construction, which treats phrases syntactically as if they were words (e.g. a don't-mess-with-me driver ). We argue that it is important to acknowledge and represent the construction's unique syntax directly rather than trying to shoehorn it into a more familiar grammatical category such as Noun or Adjective. PALs do not share the same distribution as other categories, and critically, their unique syntax influences their interpretation in predictable ways, which we demonstrate with survey data ( N = 685). In particular, PALs convey the type of meaning associated with individual English words— lemmas —and thus evoke semantic frames that are presumed shared common knowledge. We further predict that the shared common knowledge and the use of quotes encourages PALs to be interpreted as witty and sarcastic. We show that a full analysis of PALs requires a family of constructions that includes certain conventional instances and productive subtypes. Because the construction's special form and function are intimately related, we predict that comparable PAL constructions should appear in other, unrelated languages. While the PAL construction is not terribly frequent in any language, the implications we draw are quite broad: our knowledge of language is rich and complex, providing subtle means for language users to indicate familiarity with listeners while conveying their message.