This paper examines English nominal compounds whose modifier could serve as a self-sufficient discourse unit (e.g. "Hi honey, I'm home happiness," " 'not happy, money back' guarantee"). The scant literature on the construction treats such modifiers as embedded sentences, clauses, or phrases. Drawing on a collection of over 7,000 different examples from written as well as oral English of various dialects and registers, we suggest that regardless of their internal syntax, they always constitute (pieces of) fictive conversational turns. They are structured by the conversation frame as they are based on our everyday experience with situated communication. Hence, they constitute instances of fictive interaction (Pascual 2002). The direct speech element metonymically sets up a significant and easily knowable or recognizable scenario, which serves as a reference point for subcategorizing the denotative potential of the head noun. Making use of encyclopedic and episodic knowledge, direct speech compounds serve to name subjective semantic categories. They are catchy and involving, as they construct a sense of immediacy through (re)enactment. We claim their use to be motivated by the cultural model that relates saying, believing and the truth (Sweetser 1993(Sweetser [1987) as well as the understanding of talk-in-interaction as the most concrete indication of the utterer's mental, emotional and behavioral world (cf. Cicourel 1973).

This article explores direct speech involving fictive interaction, that is not functioning as an ordinary quote (e.g. “a look of ‘I told you so’”; Pascual, 2006, 2014). We specifically deal with its use as a literary strategy, in which different fictive speech constructions may serve to: (i) give access to characters’ mental worlds; (ii) show the relationships and non-verbal communication between characters; (iii) create new semantic categories; and (iv) produce such rhetorical effects as vividness or humor. Special emphasis is placed on a comparative analysis of the English fictive direct speech plus noun construction (e.g. “the ‘why bother?’ attitude”) with its translations into Polish and Spanish. We show that the construction proves a challenge to translators, since neither of these languages has an exact syntactic equivalent. This study is based on an extensive and heterogeneous database that includes 30 bestselling novels from different genres, published between 1935 and 2013.

This chapter discusses the semantics and pragmatics of the Polish construction in which a head noun is modified by a fictive interaction constituent, usually introduced by a quotative marker. A number of different quotative markers can precede fictive utterances in Polish, but these tend to occur in informal or spoken language. This nominal construction fulfils a variety of important functions in discourse. It is used to categorise concepts in a precise yet economical and often attention-gripping, humorous, or evaluative way. A wide range of concepts can be characterized by means of fictive interaction in Polish, including types of messages, individuals, and mental or physical activities. Culture-specific and novel social phenomena can also be successfully portrayed using embedded fictive utterances. The data comprises over 300 examples from a variety of oral and written texts in different genres.