this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2025
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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:
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.