Some characteristics of English morphological blends

1. Introduction One out of many word-formation processes in English is known as blending. It can be roughly defined as the intentional coinage of a new word by fusing parts of at least two source words of which either one is shortened in the fusion and/or where there is some form of phonemic or graphemic overlap of the source words; 1 some well-known examples are given in (1). (1) a. br(eakfast) × (l)unch AE brunch b. mot(or) × (h)otel AE motel c. fool × (phi)losopher AE foolosopher But apart from such cases, the word blend has also been used to refer to expressions resulting from production errors rather than from intentional coinages; examples include authentic speech-error blends and experimentally induced error blends as represented graphemically in (2) and (3) respectively. (2) a. aggra(vates) × (intensi)fies AE aggrafies b. sh(out) × (y)ell AE shell (3) a. compuls(ory) × (oblig)atory AE compulsatory b. ill(ness) × (di)sease AE illsease Blends (both intentional and accidental) are omnipresent. It comes as a surprise, therefore, that apart from a variety of taxonomic approaches and blend collections (cf. esp. Pound 1914), there are only few studies addressing the question of what regularities, if any, govern the formation of blends (and many of them are based on fairly small samples). Three main kinds of approaches can be distinguished: • some approaches are only concerned with intentional blends (e. • some are concerned with establishing correspondences between the two kinds of blends (Berg 1998) or at least seem to assume that there are enough commonalities to warrant generalisations covering both kinds of blends (e.g. Kubozono 1990, Kelly 1998). The present study investigates aspects of two closely related questions: (i) why do intentional blends have the structure they have? and (ii) to what degree are intentional blends and speech-error blends similar to each other? The aspects singled out for analysis are the following: • what determines how many elements (phonemes and/or graphemes) of each source word are fused into the blend, i.e. to what extent does the recognisability of the source words play a role? • do different blend types differ with respect to lengths of source words? • do different blend types differ in terms of frequencies of source words?