Shouldn ’ t it be breakfunch ? A quantitative analysis of blend structure in English *

The present paper investigates the word-formation process of blending in English. Following a brief review of several previous classificatory studies, the paper analyzes the orthographic and phonemic structure of blends on a quantitative basis. The main factors to be discussed are (i) the amount of information each source word contributes (following Kaunisto 2000a, 2000b) and (ii) the similarity of the source words to the blend. Several points of critique concerning previous analyses are raised and improved upon by introducing reliable ways of operationalization and statistical testing. The results show that the amount of material contributed by the words is determined by the degree of recognizability of the source words and that the similarity of source words to the blend plays a vital role in blend formation. The paper concludes by further validating these results on the basis of a comparison of intentional blends to speech-error blends and pointing out potentially rewarding avenues of further research that is currently being conducted.