Towards a New Typology of Korean Lexical Blends

Abstract

The present research is devoted to neological trends in Korean and focuses especially on the new lexical blends. Languages are constantly creating new words; this is an inevitable process caused by the changes in the world we live. Blending has been considered as a minor word formation process in Korean, but nowadays blending in Korean can be viewed as a separate word formation process due to its increasing productivity and semantic change in resulting blends. This paper first discusses the status of blends in the word formation system, then the theoretical framework and the results of the analysis of Korean blends are presented. The paper analyzes from the quantitative and qualitative perspective 301 blends collected from the National Institute of the Korean Language Dictionaries of Neologisms. Our analysis of the dictionaries showed that blending has become a highly productive and common way of word formation for various lexical layers in Korean. An increasing speed of foreign borrowing, high productivity of clipping and compounding in Korean can be viewed as the factors related to this process to a certain extent. This paper proposes a classification of blends from a semantic and cognitive viewpoint (coordinative, determinative, and derived blends are based on the mirror, single-scope, double-scope, and double blending models).