Linguistic Contamination: Word-building Peculiarities and Stylistic Functions

The article investigates the linguistic and extralinguistic nature of contamination – a word-building pattern that seems to be on the rise in modern English. The relative productivity of contamination is traced down to several factors: first, the speaker’s intention to assert his individuality through punning and word-juggling; second, saving up time and physical and mental effort; third, camouflaging some notion deemed indecent, rude, impolite and, therefore, unworthy of mentioning; fourth, in political and advertising discourse exerting an influence on the recipient. The corresponding functions of contamination are: self-expressive, compressive, euphemistic, pragmatic. The article also touches upon some borderline cases – word-building patterns considered by some linguists as contamination (or blending), which in reality present contiguous models, in some of their aspects resembling contamination, but not identical to it. The author, henceforth, strives to pinpoint some criteria that help to set contamination apart from other patterns.