Blend Words
Article :
Relations and Proportions in the Structure of English
Blend Words
Abstract : Blending as a
word-formational process has attracted a great deal of interest from linguists,
and several attempts have been made to explain the structure of blend words of
various languages. These attempts have mainly concerned the words’ semantic factors
and the stress patterns of the source words and the final blend. One particular
aspect, dealing with the proportions taken from the source words and retained
in the blend, suggests a hypothesis according to which there would be a natural
tendency to minimize the loss of information by favoring the originally shorter
source word in the final blend. Applying the theory in a small-scale study to a
pool of 102 English blend words shows that the majority of examined blends
conforms with the idea, and even in those cases which do not, a large
proportion from the shorter source form is retained in the blend.
1. Introduction
The usual opening comments in almost all articles on
blending in the last 50 years have emphasized the growing interest to this
word-formational process, typically explained by the fact that the use of
blending in forming new words seems to be increasing (especially in English).
At the same time, scholars are somewhat unanimously in agreement that a
majority of blend words as such are characteristically rather short-lived (e.g.
Bergström 1906: 42; Cannon 1986: 725, 738; Veisbergs 1997: 42). The more
intricate ways of forming blend words, in which two words are combined so as to
form a new word, joining together orthographic and phonemic items of both
source words (the most often used example in English being the word brunch
from breakfast and lunch), have also been a topic of discussion
among linguists. The usual comment on blending, however, is that there are no
clear-cut rules as to their formation: for example, Bauer (1983: 235) has
claimed that “the coiner is apparently free to take as much or as little from
either base as is felt to be necessary or desirable”. Ten years earlier, Adams
(1973: 151) had likewise commented that “it seems difficult to make any
generalizations about the shapes that splinters are likely to assume”. More
recently the question of the structure of blend words has been looked into,
e.g., by Štekauer (1997), Piñeros (1998; 1999), Gries (2004), and Jin (2005).
Kelly (1998) examined issues such as the ordering of the elements in English
blend words in relation to the frequency and the number of syllables of the
source words. Encouraging “a hypothesis-testing approach to blends” (Kelly
1998: 588), he discovered, for example, that blends show certain perceivable
patterns, being, in other words, more predictable as regards their form than
had been thought. In this paper I will outline some of the previous work on the
structure of blends, and examine a pool of blend words from the perspective of
a theory proposed in Kaunisto (2000), based on the relations and proportions of
the source words in the final blends.
2. What are blend words?
As a starting point, it is useful to examine some of the
views on defining a blend word, as there are, in fact, different types of
formations which are regarded as blends. The issue of what is a blend word is
important to address as there seems to be a degree of variation among linguists
as to which lexical item actually is a blend. In addition, the potentially
problematic instances need to be pointed out considering the compilation of a
pool of blend words for closer examination in the present study.
It has been established in the earlier literature on blend
words that there are different types of blends. Some linguists have argued that
in cases where one of the source words is represented in its entirety and a
part of another word (or “splinter”, as they are also called) has been added to
it, only those cases where there is overlapping should be regarded as blends.
For example, in tangemon, the two words share the letter e in the
middle. But in some words, such as keytainer (from key and container)
or paratroop (parachute + troop), there is no overlap
between the final part of the first source word and the initial part of the
following splinter, and subsequently are considered, e.g., by Barber (1964: 89)
to be compounds of one word plus a clipped item rather than blends. Other
linguists, on the other hand, do regard formations of this type as bona-fide
blends (e.g. Algeo 1977 and Pharies 1987). This is also the view adopted for
the purpose of the analysis in the present paper.
In some languages, further difficulties are caused by those
groups of blends which involve a recurring source word, usually the second: for
example, in English, the word magazine appears in blends such as fanzine,
videozine, and letterzine. As noted by Berman (1961: 280), Cannon
(1986: 734) and Štekauer (1997: 29), the popularity of such formations has
reached an extent where endings such as -zine, -athon, and -burger
could well be considered suffixes in their own right – blending thus being an
important source of new suffixes. It would appear reasonable to exclude all but
the very first instance of such formations in the analysis. Similarly,
inflectional endings in some cases may complicate the issue somewhat: for
example, in the English blend skurfing (ski + surfing),
the -ing ending could as well be ignored from the analysis, or
considered to have been contributed by both source words.
A few additional remarks have to be made on the general
structure of some blend words. Although blend words, as Devereux (1984: 210)
notes, “are ordinarily formed by taking the first few letters from one word and
combining these with the last few letters from the other”, other types of blend
words also exist. As observed by Soudek (1978: 465), in some cases the source
words can be seen as sharing their initial or final elements, causing some
potential difficulties in determining which elements represent the source
words. Examples of such blends in English include stagflation (stagnation
+ inflation) and fantabulous (fantastic + fabulous).
In the former example, the source words may be regarded as sharing the items ‑ation,
and fa- in the latter. This may be a more attractive description of the
structure of the blend words rather than claiming that stagnation in the
blend stagflation is represented only and exclusively by the splinter stag-.
In fact, there are other examples of discontinuous or non-sequential blends in
English, such as chortle (coined by Lewis Carroll from chuckle
and snort), although they are a small minority among existing blend
words, as noted by Cannon (1987: 154).
As regards the semantic types of blend words, Plag (2003:
122) distinguishes between two groups of words: ones which may be considered to
be abbreviated forms of previously existing compound words (e.g. breathalyzer
from breath and analyzer, or an earlier compound breath
analyzer), and ones which denote concrete or abstract things sharing the
semantic characteristics of both source words (e.g. brunch from breakfast
and lunch; with no previously existing compound breakfast lunch).
In the present study, the two groups are not examined separately, although it
is worth considering that the fine structure of the final blends may differ
depending on whether there was a previously existing compound of the two source
words or not.
3. The proportional
representation of source words in blends
When considering the structural characteristics of blends,
it is clear that a number of factors have contributed to the ultimate shape and
form of the blend word. It is not impossible that different options or
alternatives for blend words suggest themselves, or even that different rival
forms have existed before a particular form has eventually prevailed in popular
use. Spelling variants are also occasionally encountered (e.g. gues(s)timate
from guess and estimate). In some instances, there may be
clear semantic reasons explaining, for instance, the ordering of the two source
words in the final blend: in brunch, the chronological ordering of breakfast
and lunch makes it logical that the splinters from the two source words
are given in the same order. Some studies have been conducted on other
characteristics in blend structure. Kelly (1998) observes that the first source
words in blends tend to be higher in frequency and they usually contain fewer
syllables than the second source words. He furthermore notes that the
boundaries between the two splinters occur primarily at major phonological
joints (such as syllable boundaries) of the source words, and that the phonemes
at the juncture are often phonologically similar (Kelly 1998: 585-587). Other
observations have been made on the general prosodic aspects in blending; e.g.,
Plag (2003) and Jin (2005) have looked into the syllable structures of the
source words and the final target words.
As early as the beginning of the 20th century,
Bergström (1906: 46) pointed out in his thesis the possibility of investigating
“the quantity of the contribution of each element in each different case”.
Unfortunately he did not specify exactly what he had in mind. It is evident
that he did not think much of such an approach, saying that he preferred not to
consider the structuring elements of blend words “as a relation or proportion
almost in a mathematical sense and way” (Bergström 1906: 16). Later on in the
thesis he explained that based on his material he did not see enough reason to
present any such rules. He did, however, present a table of blend words
according to the stress patterns of the source words and the resulting blend
word.
The question of mathematical relations and proportions,
mentioned by Bergström but not commented on since by linguists, is nevertheless
one that seems to deserve further investigation. As background and support for
this view we could consider the observations made by, for instance, Pound
(1914: 1), who wrote that blend words “retain, for a while at least, the
suggestive power of their various elements”. Cannon (1987: 144) has also
commented that when forming new words by blending, “the reduction usually
requires retention of major parts of the two source words”. Attention could be
drawn here to the word “major” and also to the importance of “the suggestive
power”. How could we define what exactly constitutes a major part that has to
be retained in order to produce new blend words which would be well-formed? How
large does a part of one source word have to be so as to still have the
suggestive power of the complete original form? And then, could this be an
aspect from which the two source words could be compared?
It could be argued that the deletion of any items from the
source words presents a certain amount of “danger” or “threat” to the
understandability of the final blend word. From this viewpoint, ideal blends
then would naturally be ones where the ending of the first source word and the
beginning of the second one overlap, resulting in a way in no deletion at all.
Examples of this kind of “ideal” blending – which Cannon (1987: 144) calls the
“traditional” kind of blending – in English include shamateur,
slanguage, netiquette, and palimony. But as observed earlier,
this type of blending covers only a fraction of all blend words, as there are
also blends where elements of either one or both of the source words has
undergone deletion.
In Kaunisto (2000), a theory was proposed concerning the
aspect of preservation of the elements of the source words, attempting to at
least partly explain where and how deletion of elements takes place. In
blending two words together, one might assume that there would be a natural
tendency to preserve as much from the shorter source word as possible, and thus
to minimise the loss of information on the source form that would be under a
greater “threat”. It could be proposed that as a result of such a tendency, the
relation between the part of the shorter form represented in the final word and
the entire source word is greater than (or equals) that between the part of the
longer word in the final word and the entire longer source word. In other
words, a greater percentage of the originally shorter source word is retained
in the blend. To illustrate the idea, we could consider the English blend word brunch,
from the source words breakfast and lunch. The longer word, breakfast,
is represented in the final word, brunch, by only two letters (br),
while the originally longer word, lunch, is represented in the final
word by four letters (unch), and the relation 2:9 is less than 4:5, so
here the theory would seem to work.
One question arising from this theorizing, of course, is what
is exactly meant by length here: orthographical or phonological length?
Although it could be argued that letters themselves do not have a significant
weight in word-formation in general, the argument could be at least tested with
the numbers of orthographical units. One could also postulate whether blend
words often originate in written rather than spoken language – a matter which
itself deserves further examination.
If we consider then that two words, X and Y, are blended to
form a third word, Z, and that X is represented in Z by A (a part of X, that
is) and Y is represented in Z by B, the hypothesis can be presented in the
following simple axiom:
if
x > y, then a:x ≤ b:ywhere x = the number of letters/phonemes in X
y = the number of letters/phonemes in Y
a = the number of letters/phonemes in A
b = the number of letters/phonemes in B
Thus for the word brunch we could present the following:
X = breakfast, Y = lunch;
A = br, B = unch;
x (breakfast) = 9, y (lunch) = 5,
a = 2, b = 4;
in which case the final blend does indeed conform with the
suggested axiom, as a:x = 0.22, which is smaller than b:y = 0.8.
For the word tangemon, where X is tangerine
and Y is lemon, the corresponding breakdown would be x = 9, y = 5, a =
5, b = 4; and again the axiom holds, as a:x = 0.56, which is smaller than b:y =
0.8. A notable thing here is the fact that the e in the middle of the
blend is counted twice, due to the overlap of the source words in that element.
Cannon (1987: 144) writes that there are blends “where both source-words share
one or more letters/sounds that often prevent us from determining which word
has provided the shared element”. As was observed earlier in connection with
the word stagflation, there seem to be no reasons why such letters or
sounds could not be regarded to have been provided jointly by both source
words. Instead, as observed by Kaunisto (2000), this is very probably one
significant aspect why the formation of such blend words was attractive in the
first place, therefore including the shared elements in the calculations of
both source words would appear to be perfectly justifiable. Following this line
of analysis, in the blend word fantabulous (from fantastic and fabulous),
the second – and originally shorter – source word, fabulous, is
represented in the final blend in its entirety, albeit in a discontinuous
fashion.
4. Examining of a pool of
English blend words
To further investigate the strength of the axiom on English
blends, a small-scale study was conducted on a pool of blend words compiled
from a variety of sources. When compiling the blends for closer analysis, it
was considered best to focus on items which could be regarded as having shown a
reasonable degree of viability in the lexicon. Although there are numerous
instances of blend words that could be found altogether, many of them may not
have gained much currency in general use, and while there could be several
reasons for the obsolescence of a blend, one reason could be the formal or
structural deficiency of the word itself.
The blend words were compiled from a number of linguistic
articles on blend words (Algeo 1977, Cannon 1987, Štekauer 1997, and Kelly
1998), and the CD-ROM editions of The Oxford English Dictionary (1992, 2nd
edition), Collins Electronic English Dictionary and Thesaurus (1995, 3rd
edition), The Random House Compact Unabridged Dictionary (1996, 2nd
edition), and The Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary and
Thesaurus (1999, 10th edition). Occurrences of 20th-century
blend words from these sources were then checked in the 100-million-word British
National Corpus as well as the Internet (using the Google search engine),
and any words not found in these sources (together with ones of which only
metalinguistic instances were found) were excluded from further analysis.
This resulted in a
pool of 102 blend words (listed fully in the Appendix in
groups according to their relation to the examined axiom). Although one could
argue that the selection of the words as described here provides a markedly
conservative selection of blend words or a set of words which is does not reflect
the most recently coined items, it is worth reiterating that the intention was
to find examples of blends that have in some discernible fashion stood the test
of time. As a point of comparison, Cannon (1986) and Kelly (1998) examined
collections of 132 and 320 blend words, respectively, but it is worth noting
that their studies also included cases which may have been rather ephemeral.
Considering the proportions in which the source words were
represented in the resultant 102 blend words examined, it can be observed that
in the majority of the cases the axiom tested holds; in other words, one can
find higher proportions of the originally shorter words retained in the final
blends. The results representing different groups of blend words according to
how the words relate to the proposed axiom can be summarized as follows:
Table 1. The results of the examined blend wordsrelation of the blends with the proposed axiom |
# of words (% of words) |
examples |
conforming
with the axiom |
71
(69.6%) |
fantabulous
(fantastic
+ fabulous)
gasohol (gasoline + alcohol) smaze (smoke + haze) stagflation (stagnation + inflation) |
blends
with source words of equal length (the axiom has no prediction on them) |
13
(12.7%) |
citrange
(citrus
+ orange)
meld (melt + weld) motel (motor + hotel) Spanglish (Spanish + English) |
not
conforming with the axiom |
18
(17.6%) |
infotainment
(information
+ entertainment)
lemandarin (lemon + mandarin) tangelo (tangerine + pomelo) zebrule (zebra + mule) |
total |
102
(100.0%)
|
As can be seen in Table 1, there are some blend words where
the source words are of equal length (e.g. meld from melt and weld),
and the axiom therefore makes no prediction as to the proportional
representation of the source words in the final blend. In a good majority of
the instances, however, the source words were of different length, and of these
89 cases, in as many as 71 blends the proportions of the source words in the
blends were in agreement with the proposed axiom. Of all the blends examined,
15 words were so-called “ideal” blends where both source words were preserved
in their entirety with the two source words overlapping at the boundary (e.g. shamateur
from sham and amateur, and palimony from pal and
alimony). As many as 14 of these blends are also included in the words
conforming with the axiom, as the source words were of different length (one
instance, glas(s)teel, had equally long source words).
As in only 18 instances of the words in the entire pool of 102
blend words the proportional representation did not agree with the axiom, it
can be said that the tendency to preserve more elements from the originally
shorter forms appears to be rather common. This is further supported by the
observation that even in the blends which did not conform with the axiom (i.e.,
the proportional representations of the longer forms were greater than those of
the shorter ones), the shorter forms were represented in the final blends on
average by 50.0% of the lengths of the original forms. In other words, half the
length of the shorter forms on average was retained even if the longer source
word was “proportionally dominant” in the final blend.
It is worth noting that the results on the words examined
would not look drastically different if the analysis had focused on the numbers
of phonemes instead of letters. The assessment of whether the blend conformed
with the axiom or not would have changed in only a few instances. Some of these
examples also illustrate the deliberately playful character of the words
themselves: from a phonemic point of view, in blaxploitation (black(s)
+ exploitation) both forms are preserved in their entirety, although a
strict orthographical analysis would indicate that the shorter form is
represented by fewer elements in the blend (cf. Cannon 1986: 747).
Some additional comments can be made as regards the
structures of the blend words examined. There did not seem to be any striking
difference as to whether it was the first or second source word that had greater
proportional representation in the final blend: in 33 instances, the first
source word had greater representation, whereas in 50 cases it was the second
source word which had a proportionally greater number of letters retained in
the final blend. Interestingly enough, this also corresponds with the
observation made by Pharies (1987) on Spanish blend words. Furthermore, among
the English blends examined, in 17 blends the first source word was retained in
its entirety and followed by a splinter from the second word, while 10 blends
were comprised of a splinter from the first word and the whole of the second
source word.
5. Conclusion
Based on the examination of the pool of blend words in the
present study, it appears that the tendency suggested earlier for English
blends by Kaunisto (2000) might be one possible factor explaining why some
blend words have been formed as they have. The extent to which the blend words
seem to conform with the idea seems worth noting, and adds to our knowledge on
their formation. One can share the notion expressed, for example, by Kelly
(1998: 588) of the promising future prospects in the study of blends, for the
observations made here also have other possible implications and possibilities
to expand the investigation. For example, as regards the question of the
well-formedness of blend words, the conformity with the proposed theory might
in future be looked into from the viewpoint of the words’ lifespan, i.e. it
could be argued that the structural unattractiveness of blend words might be
one reason why they have become short-lived, a characteristic which is rather
common among blends. In a similar vein, it might be interesting to examine the
structural aspects of blend words in different languages in a contrastive or
comparative fashion: for example, a brief look at the Spanish blend words
analysed by Pharies (1987) and Piñeros (1999) would appear to show a slightly
stronger tendency for the Spanish words to preserve a greater proportion of the
shorter source word, with almost 80 per cent of the words agreeing with the
proposed axiom.
However, it must be noted that the theory on the
proportional representation of the source words in the final blends should be
regarded as only one of the factors that would affect their formation, and not
as a conclusive one that would override others (including syllabic structure,
stress patterns, and semantic factors). Support for this view can be seen when
considering those instances of blend words where the source words are of equal
length, for if the tendency suggested was strong enough to rule out other
possibilities of forming the blend, the splinters from the source words should
always be of equal length as well – and this was by no means the case.
Considering the theory from conceptual viewpoint, one can also question why the
interest as regards the understandability and interpretability of the blend
word should be focused solely on the preservation of the originally shorter
source word. For example, how is the notion of interpretability eventually
served in the case of brunch when we consider the fact that the longer source
word, breakfast, is represented in the final blend by only two out of nine
letters (or two out of eight phonemes)? Nevertheless, it can be concluded that
based on the examination of relations and proportions of blend words, the issue
clearly deserves attention as one of the potentially contributing factors in
the formation of the words in question.
Example
Appendix: The list of blend
words examined.
A. Blend words which conform with the axiom:1. advertique (advertisement + antique)
2. advertorial (advertisement + editorial)
3. airmada (air + Armada)
4. alphametic (alphabet + arithmetic)
5. Amerindian (American + Indian)
6. autopia (auto + utopia)
7. bagonize (bag + agonize)
8. ballute (balloon + parachute)
9. beautility (beauty + utility)
10. beefalo (beef + buffalo)
11. biathlete (biathlon + athlete)
12. bimboy (bimbo + boy)
13. boatel (boat + hotel)
14. booboisie (boob + bourgeoisie)
15. breathalyzer (breath + analyzer)
16. californicate (California + fornicate)
17. caplet (capsule + tablet)
18. cassingle (cassette + single)
19. cinnamint (cinnamon + mint)
20. compander (compressor + expander)
21. cosmeceutical (cosmetic(s) + pharmaceutical)
22. dancercise (dance + exercise)
23. decathlete (decathlon + athlete)
24. diesohol (diesel + alcohol)
25. dramedy (drama + comedy)
26. emoticon (emotion + icon)
27. editated (edit(ed) + annotated)
28. fandemonium (fan + pandemonium)
29. fantabulous (fantastic + fabulous)
30. floatel (float + hotel)
31. frauditor (fraud + auditor)
32. gasohol (gas + alcohol)
33. gaydar (gay + radar)
34. glas(s)phalt (glass + asphalt)
35. glitterati (glitter + literati)
36. gues(s)timate (guess + estimate)
37. happenstantial (happen + circumstantial)
38. heliport (helicopter + airport)
39. icecapade (ice + escapade)
40. irregardless (irrespective + regardless)
41. Japlish (Japanese + English)
42. medicare (medical + care)
43. melatonin (melanocyte + serotonin)
44. mockumentary (mock + documentary)
45. musicassette (music + cassette)
46. orature (oral + literature)
47. palimony (pal + alimony)
48. parafoil (parachute + airfoil)
49. pornotopia (pornography + utopia)
50. privilegentsia (privilege + intelligentsia)
51. psytocracy (psychological + autocracy)
52. pulsar (pulsating + star)
53. scanties (scant + panties)
54. scrapnel (scrap + shrapnel)
55. sellebration (sell + celebration)
56. sexploitation (sex + exploitation)
57. shamateur (sham + amateur)
58. shoat (sheep + goat)
59. slanguage (slang + language)
60. slimnastics (slim + gymnastics)
61. slumpflation (slump + inflation)
62. smaze (smoke + haze)
63. smog (smoke + fog)
64. spork (spoon + fork)
65. stagflation (stagnation + inflation)
66. swel(l)egant (swell + elegant)
67. tangemon (tangerine + lemon)
68. telecast (television + broadcast)
69. transceiver (transmitter + receiver)
70. wavicle (wave + particle)
71. wintertainment (winter + entertainment)
B. Blends where the two source words are of equal length (the axiom/hypothesis does not comment on such instances):
1. celebutante (celebrity + debutante)
2. citrange (citrus + orange)
3. ecdysone (ecdysis + hormone)
4. glas(s)teel (glass + steel)
5. meld (melt + weld)
6. motel (motor + hotel)
7. organule (organism + molecule)
8. pomato (potato + tomato)
9. positron (positive + electron)
10. rurban (rural + urban)
11. Spanglish (Spanish + English)
12. squadrilla (squadron + guerilla)
13. zorse (zebra + horse)
C. Blends which do not conform with the axiom:
1. blaxploitation (black + exploitation)
2. burbulence (burp + turbulence)
3. cafetorium (cafeteria + auditorium)
4. docutainment (documentary + entertainment)
5. etorphine (ether + morphine)
6. floptical (floppy + optical
7. geep (goat + sheep)
8. infotainment (information + entertainment)
9. Klavern (Klan + cavern)
10. lemandarin (lemon + mandarin)
11. skorts (skirt + shorts)
12. skurfing (ski(ing) + surfing)
13. snurfing (snow + surfing)
14. tangelo (tangerine + pomelo)
15. traxcavator (tractor + excavator)
16. vibronic (vibration + electronic)
17. zebrule (zebra + mule)
18. zonkey (zebra + donkey)
Sumber : http://research.jyu.fi/kieliskooppi/article/2013-11-Relations-and-Proportions-in-the-Structure-of-English-Blend-Words.html
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