How do people talk about words? This work explores naming constructions such as This formation is called a "coral reef" that are used to introduce lexicalized concepts like coral reef through metalinguistic reference. Drawing on the theoretical foundations in philosophy of language as well as recent work in semantics and pragmatics, experimental evidence from corpus analyses and psycholinguistic experiments-including self-paced reading and eye-tracking data-uncover the linguistic and cognitive processes behind these naming constructions. Special attention is given to the use and processing of quotational constructions during reading. Bridging (psycho)linguistics and philosophy of language, this interdisciplinary work offers new insights into how people use quotational constructions to talk about language, and how readers interpret and process naming constructions with and without quotation marks.