BLENDS IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE: A MORPHOSEMANTIC APPROACH (original) (raw)
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Unpacking contemporary English blends: Morphological structure, meaning, processing
It is not coincidental that blend words (e. g. nutriceutical ← nutricious + pharmaceutical, blizzaster ← blizzard + disaster) are more and more often used in media sources. In a blend, two (or sometimes more) words become one compact and attention-catching form, which is at the same time relatively transparent, so that the reader or listener can still recognise several constituents in it. These features make blends one of the most intriguing types of word formation. At the same time, blends are extremely challenging to study. A classical morpheme-based morphological description is not suitable for blends because their formation does not involve morphemes as such. This implies two possible approaches: either to deny blends a place in regular morphology (as suggested in Dressler (2000), for example), or to find grounds for including them into general morphological descriptions and theories (as was done, using different frameworks, in López Rúa (2004b), Gries (2012), Arndt-Lappe and Pl...
Blends: an intermediate category at the crossroads of morphology and phonology
Yearbook of the Poznan Linguistic Meeting
Blends are traditionally seen as irregular and unsystematic. In this paper it is shown that one must make a distinction between stub compounds or clipped compounds (sitcom, misper) and real blends (brunch, advertorial). In much of the literature on blends, however, stub compounds are classified as blends. Stub compounds appear to be compounds and follow the Compound Stress Rule, whereas blends turn out to form a category of its own. Blends exhibit a right-hand head and insofar they can be compared to compounds. However, their prosodic structure is a copy of the second source word, the word where the final part of the word comes from. The analysis presented here demonstrates that blends consist of one prosodic word, whereas compounds consist of two. This proves that blends are an intermediate category of their own at the intersection of phonology and morphology. The examples discussed mainly come from English. Data from Dutch and German is also presented.
On the marginality of lexical blending
Linguistics, 2008
In spite of a recent surge of interest in it, blending remains among the most poorly understood and elusive word formation processes. What almost everybody seems to be agreed on is that, although it appears to be attested in many languages, it is doubtlessly a marginal morphological process. However, a closer look at crosslinguistic data reveals that there are striking differences between individual languages concerning the degree of its marginality. The goal we set ourselves in the present paper is to motivate the observed cross-linguistic differences by discussing two clusters of factors that may play an important role in making blending more or less marginal, i.e. serve as functional prerequisites for the spread of blends. One of these are certain constructional traits of the languages involved. What we primarily have in mind here is the prominence of the constructional schemas for two other word formation processes-compounding and clipping. The other cluster of factors involved here has to do with the dynamics and flexibility in the lexicon, viz. the speed with which foreign lexemes are adapted and become near-native elements of the lexical stock. Our claim is that the less open and flexible a language is in this respect, the more marginal the blends that are found (if any) will tend to be.
This article presents an approach to the resolution of a much discussed problem of morphological classification of blend words and their distinction from the neighbouring morphological categories such as clipping compounds. The research focuses on novel coinages and takes a data-driven approach to study the interaction between the form and the meaning of blends/clipping compounds. A multifactorial analysis of formal and semantic properties of these words is undertaken, as a result of which phonological and structural differences between blends and clipping compounds are explained using formal and semantic factors.
Keep calm and carry on blending: Experimental insights into Romanian lexical blending
Word Structure, 2024
Although lexical blending is considered a creative and unpredictable process, the literature shows that it tends to follow certain patterns (Gries 2012; Beliaeva 2019), a tendency observed mainly in English. To check whether such generalisations and constraints are the same for Romanian or whether there are language-specific features affecting lexical blending, we created a hybrid-object image-based online experiment asking 110 Romanian native speakers, students at the University of Bucharest who rated themselves as advanced and intermediate users of English, to use only one word to name the hybrids presented to them; as compounding is mainly used in Romanian to name hybrids, we expected it to be more often used. Surprisingly, 68.31% of the elicited Romanian words were lexical blends, likely due to the linguistic profile of our subjects, reinforcing Vasileanu & Niculescu-Gorpin's (2022) corpus based-analysis that suggests that, due to the global English influence, the process is also active in Romanian. Most of the elicited Romanian lexical blends observe the patterns acknowledged in the literature, e.g. merging the beginning of the first source-word with the end of the second, preservingthe phonological contour of a source-word, and source-word clipping at syllableboundaries. Nevertheless, a handful of items revealed morpho-phonological propertiesthat had been previously considered impossible in blends (e.g. interfixes or switch pointsinside complex syllable constituents), evidence that some constraints, formulated mainlyfor English, need to be checked against larger datasets and against other languages aslexical blending is a very creative process that seems to transgress possible constraints.