An amalgam and its puzzles*

Lakoff (1974) brought to the attention of the linguistic community a construction that seems to have triggered surprisingly little interest in the subsequent literature. The construction at issue exhibits constituents with the superficial appearance of root sentences in positions that are normally filled by DPs, APs or PPs (functioning as arguments, adjuncts, or predicates), and presumably for this reason, was dubbed by Lakoff an 'amalgam.' We will refer to this construction as an Andrews Amalgam (AA) (since Lakoff credits Avery Andrews with its discovery), and to the apparent root sentences in it as AAI(nsert)s. In this brief essay, I will highlight a number of prima facie puzzles associated with this construction, offering solutions to some of them, and indicating those that remain to be addressed. An AA with multiple AAIs is shown in (1).