Lexical Blends: Functionally Tuning the Transparency of Complex Words

Abstract

In this article, blending is defined as deliberate extragrammatical compounding. As such, it is distinct from non-deliberate creation such as contamination, from regular compounding, as well as from other extragrammatical morphological techniques such as shortening. For blending defined in this way, a typology is proposed according to the degree of transparency. This ranges from very transparent so-called “telescope blends”, such as Amtsschimmelpilz ‘red tape fungus’ < Amtsschimmel ‘red tape’ x Schimmelpilz ‘fungus’, to completely opaque “fragment blends”, such as Cujasuma < Cuba x Java x Sumatra (a brand of tobacco). This scale is tested on two corpuses of blends containing satirical blends and brand names, respectively. The satirical blends, whose effect depends to a large degree on their intelligibility, do, in fact, exhibit a higher preference for transparency than the brand names, for which transparency is functional to a certain degree only. This suggests the following conclusions: Language users have a very precise intuition for different degrees of transparency and are able to use this purposefully. Therefore, basing a typology of blends on transparency is more to the point than basing it on purely distributional features, as is commonly the case. Even in the diachronic perspective, the language users' intuition regarding phonological features ensuring the transparency of intricately complex words has been instrumental in shaping the strongly inflectional forms of NHG inflection and derivation implying vowel changes in addition to suffixation. It is this very intuition which underlies not only normal morphological competence, but also the extragrammatical competence which enables language users to develop and make creative use of extragrammatical techniques such as blending.