Phrasal names: A constructionist analysis
Geert Booij · WORD Structure · 2009
Some types of phrases share the naming function with complex words. Hence both phrases and words can be lexical units stored in the lexicon. This article discusses how the functional equivalence between words and phrases can be accounted for without ignoring their formal differences. Such types of phrases can be characterized in terms of phrasal schemas with specific properties, that is, as constructions. The article focuses on the formal properties of adjective+noun sequences with a naming function, in particular in Modern Greek and Dutch. The constructionist approach is able to do justice to the lexical unit properties of phrasal names, and highlights the parallelism between phrasal and morphological constructions.