phraseine

Phraseine is a term used in linguistics to describe a category of multiword expressions that behave like a single unit of meaning and a single syntactic unit. The concept is proposed to capture phrases whose combined meaning cannot be straightforwardly predicted from their parts, yet whose usage patterns are relatively fixed compared to fully productive sequences. Phraseine is often discussed alongside idioms, fixed expressions, collocations, and phrasal verbs, but scholars who use the term argue that it can cover expressions that are not fully idiomatic or entirely compositional.

In analysis, phraseine sequences are treated as units during parsing and production, and may be listed in lexicons as multiword lemmas. Commonly cited examples include phrases that convey a non-literal meaning, such as "spill the beans" or "kick the bucket," though the precise boundaries of phraseine remain debated and vary by language and theoretical framework.

The status of phraseine as a formal category varies across linguistics traditions. Some researchers view it as a practical heuristic for modeling language use, while others consider it redundant with existing notions of idioms or multiword expressions. There is no universal consensus on formal criteria or annotation guidelines, and empirical work often seeks to establish corpus-based criteria for identification.

See also: multiword expression, idiom, collocation, phrasal verb.