Linguistics, Vol. 9 No. 1-2, 2008.
Original scientific paper
On the marginality of lexical blending
Rita Brdar-Szabó
; Loránd Eötvös University, Budapest
Mario Brdar
orcid.org/0000-0002-9582-4285
; University of Osijek
Abstract
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.
Keywords
lexical blending; contrastive linguistics; motivation; constructional schema; conceptual integration; word formation; compounding; clipping; truncation; lexical borrowing
Hrčak ID:
30684
URI
Publication date:
22.12.2008.
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