CC BY
29
Lavrova N.A.
PhD, Associate Professor at the Department of English Lexicology, Moscow State Pedagogical University
BLENDS: FANCIFUL COINAGES OR NEOLOGICAL FORMATIONS?
Abstract
The article postulates that by far the most common type of word-creation is recombination and reshuffling of the existing patterns. Research reveals that novel words may be born out of the desire to produce a stylistic effect (in works offiction), as a result of the objective need for a new word that is supposed to reflect a new notion (in scientific developments); for lack of knowledge of pre-existing vocabulary items; in spontaneous colloquial communication where the emotional aspect may take the upper hand and victimize precision in communicating your idea. The most numerous groups constituted by neological blends are "Varieties of English" (hybridEnglishes), "Tools, appliances, gadgets and commodities", "Technology and scientific terms ", "Food and food supplements ", "Crosses and hybrids ".
Keywords: blends, neologisms, novel and fanciful creations
Ключевые слова: бленды, неологизмы, новообразования шутливого характера
Different means of creating neologisms have been observed and registered over the years, with some predominating and others having, as it were, a more modest, marginalized role. By far the most common type of word-creation is re-combination and reshuffling of the existing patterns. The subconscious or sometimes conscious penchant of native speakers for the latter type of word-creation is down to the fact that it provides recognizability of the pertinent elements and allows for the speaker's ability to infer the probable meaning of the newly-coined word. It is also true that different psychological processes underlie the creation of new words. Although the word "creation" may be deemed to a certain extent imprecise, it has traditionally been applied to the making of new words along with its more neutral synonym "coinage". Both terms imply that there is a certain degree of effort on the part of the speaker, who deliberately, rather than inadvertently or unwittingly, mint new words and/or expressions. Analyzing the underlying causes of the emergence of new words, it may be suggested that depending on where they originate, they may be born out of the desire to produce a stylistic effect (in works of fiction), as a result of the objective need for a new word that is supposed to reflect a new notion (in scientific developments); for lack of knowledge of pre-existing vocabulary items; in spontaneous colloquial communication where the emotional aspect may take the upper hand and victimize precision in communicating your idea.
Some coinages, like blends, may also originate as a result of a slip of the tongue. Due to the phonological, semantic or subjective similarity of words, both of them may become simultaneously activated during the process of speech production: one word gets superimposed on the other, and a blend emerges. The so-called "subjective similarity" or, more accurately, contingency of two or more words is due to the perceptual contingency of the notions they represent to the speaker. This tradition of explaining slips of the tongue goes down to S. Freud who postulated that the seemingly innocuous speech slips and errors are, in fact, revelations of an individual's repressed preoccupations and desires that spring forth as slips of the tongue. However, a slip of the tongue may still be down to the contingency of notions and yet not a result of bursting desires that have been repressed. In a series of experiments by Tamiko Azuma, Erica J. Williams, and Juliet E. Davie, it was established that the presentation of words with shared phonology or semantics may regularly induce blended memory errors. This can be explained by the workings of our memory, in which related items activate each other: "More recent models propose that, with sufficient similarity, information from separate events may be retrieved together, causing memory blends, "memory" for nonexperienced stimuli or events....
Depending on the original encoding task, words may be represented in memory with emphasis on their semantic, orthographic (visual), or phonological dimensions. Models of lexical access assume that presentation of a homophone activates both spellings through shared phonology. Given this assumption, it should be possible to induce memory errors by using words with shared phonology similar to those observed for words with overlapping semantic representations" [1, 723]. According to the authors, memory load performance relates to word memory ability - the more words people can remember during the task, the better their word memory. As word memory decreases, false alarms (blends as slips of the tongue) increase: "This finding had two important implications: first, people with stronger word memory seem better able to separate memory load words and study homophones. That is, they appear less susceptible to memory blends, or source errors. Second, although people with weaker word memory explicitly recall fewer memory load words, they experience a stronger impact of those words in the later recognition test" [1, 728]. Although these findings seem to imply that people equipped with a better memory tend to produce fewer blended misnomers, none of us can escape a slip of the tongue which is a blend, although the exact relation of blended misnomers to other types of slips need to be investigated.
Blends, whether misnomers or a conscious creation, for some reason provoke a great deal of discussion, especially on the Internet: whole blogs are created which are specifically devoted to the discussion of their morphological, stylistic and pragmatic aspects. Some bloggers argue in favour of some synonymous terms, such as "portmanteau words" and "telescope words", while others are rabidly opposed to those seemingly "profane" terms and claim that "lexical blending" is the only correct nomination. Word-building popularity of blends is also reflected in the recent influx of blend names for various goods, commodities and services, which are usually of hybrid nature, although not necessarily so. Here are some recent examples of such products that we managed to find on the Internet:
Out of the 220 neological blends we managed to "unearth", the most wide-spread groups turned out to be as follows: "Varieties of English" (hybrid Englishes), "Tools, appliances, gadgets and commodities", "Technology and scientific terms", "Food and food supplements", "Crosses and hybrids". By far the most numerous and prolific group in neological blends is comprised of various kinds of goods and products offered to the consumer. Crosses and hybrids, which are objectively not numerous, almost invariably attract a blended name, whereas commodities not necessarily do: apparently, suppliers feel hesitant about a blend designation, because, first, not all the source words can be efficiently blended, that is, in such a way that the recipient can correctly decode them; and second, even if the source words are prone to easy blending, it will take some time on the part of the consumer not only to retrieve the source words, but also to arrive at the notion that stands behind them. Below are some examples of neological blends, that is, blends which represent names of recently invented products or creations which are usually devoid of any connotations:
Table Some Examples of Neological Blends in English
Blend Definition Description and/or Illustration
clamato - clam + tomato a drink made of reconstituted tomato juice concentrate flavoured with spices and clam broth Originally a trademark of the Mott 's company which denotes a drink made primarily of reconstituted tomato juice concentrate. Clamato was first produced in 1966 by the Duffy-Mott company in Hamlin, New York, by two employees who wanted to create a Manhattan clam chowder style cocktail by combining tomato juice and clam broth with spices. They also named the new cocktail Mott's Clamato and secured the trademark for the new brand. The brand was owned by
Cadbury-Schweppes after the company bought Mott's in 1982. It is now owned by the Dr Pepper Snapple Group.
croissandwich (CroissanWich ) - croissant + sandwich a croissandwich roll with a typical sandwich filling The name "CroissanWich" is a registered trademark of Burger King Holdings and is to be displayed with the "circle-R" (®) symbol in non-linguistic contexts. Nowadays the word is frequently used as a common noun, in which case it is not capitalized.
spork - spoon + fork a hybrid of cutlery taking the form of a spoon-like scoop with three or four fork tines Sporks have been manufactures since the late 19th century, when the word "spork" was registered as a trademark in the USA. This utensil is primarily used by fast-food restaurants, schools, hitchhikers and travelers. The word "spork" entered the "Century Dictionary" in 1909 where it was described as a long, slender spoon having, at the end of the bowl, projections resembling the tines of a fork. A combined spoon, fork, and knife closely resembling the modern spork was invented by Samuel W. Francis and issued US Patent in February 1874.
eggcessories -eggs + accessories devices that contain the image and are frequently in the shape of an egg eggcessories are colourful, convenient, affordable and stylish. They are characterized by a number of different functions, such as: boiling, whisking, slicing and piercing an egg. They may also be used as an ornament or for egg-non-related purposes.
kegerator -keg + refrigerator a beer dispensing device stored on a refrigerated container A device stored in a refrigerated container in order to keep the keg chilled. A kegerator may be purchased in its finished form or built from a re-purposed refrigerator or a freezer with special equipment. A kegerator conversion kit is a simple way to convert a regular refrigerator or freezer into a beer-dispensing kegerator. One of the advantages of using full kegerators for home beer dispensing is that they can often hold more than one keg.
skeleto ol skeleton + tool a multifunctional tool that combines the properties of a knife, pliers, a screwdriver, etc. Skeletool (originally a trademark name) offers minimal weight, compact size and a lot of capabilities. Keeping weight and volume to a minimum, it combines both quality and functionality. Many multitools have multiple options, but they're often heavier and loaded with more features than most people need on a regular basis. The skeletool is a versatile tool that has a large straight knife blade that can be accessed while the tool is closed. The skeletool is light, compact, and easy to transport.
As can be seen from the examples above, modern blends differ from the ones introduced and popularized by L. Carroll in being more transparent and easier to decode. Their meaning, however, retains a degree of idiomaticity, which is contingent upon, first, whether one of the elements is used in a metaphorical meaning and, second, the relationship between the blend and the notion they refer to. This latter relationship is very often analyzed in terms of the semantic and syntactic relationship between the components of a blend. Out of the given examples a degree of idiomaticity is retained by the words "eggcessories" and "skeletool": the meaning of both of them is not the sum total of the meaning of their components. Eggcessories are not a combination of real eggs and accessories; strictly speaking, they are neither eggs, nor accessories, but a kitchen appliance in the shape of an egg, some of them are not even meant for doing something with an egg, like, for example, an egg-shaped scraper meant for scraping a bowl's edge, cutting dough into sections and spreading fillings and frostings.
An important property of blend words is the conceptual unity that arises from their structure: "the tight lexical integration of two distinct word-forms into a unified lexical whole suggests an equally tight integration of ideas at the conceptual level" [2, 398]. Despite a certain reserve about creating and using blends, they are actively exploited in various spheres of communication: in advertising, as products' names, in children's books and in fantasy novels. What unites almost all blends, apart from purely terminological ones, is the underlying ludic, that is, punning, function that seems to be their cachet. As playful and fanciful formations, they immediately catch our attention and arouse an interest in their from, meaning and function. Tony Veale and Cristina Butnariu posit that their "humorous effects can arise when integration at the lexical level forces together ideas that one might consider incompatible at the conceptual and pragmatic levels" [2, 398]. According to Tony Veale and Cristina Butnariu, 51 % of the Wikipedia neologisms allow for easy recognition of their semantic head. The remaining 49% of cases require some effort on the part of the recipient to determine the appropriate sense of the semantic head before the blended neologism can be correctly interpreted. The analysis of blends conducted by Tony Veale and Cristina Butnariu reveals that over half (57%) of the neologisms are realized via a simple hypernymy relationships, while the remainder 43 % have a more nuanced relationship with their component parts. It means that the majority of blends (although not the overwhelming majority) roughly denote a variation of the object described by their semantic head, which is usually the second component of a blend. Roughly, blended neologisms can be divided into two groups - those whose component features are reciprocated (strong features); and those whose components are not reciprocated or only obliquely reciprocated (weak features). In the first group are blends that are related either phonologically or semantically; in the second group are blends that are not related either phonetically or semantically. Presumably, the former type of blends are more efficient pragmatically, since we definitely feel some justification in their creation. The coinage of the latter type of blend is harder to justify: when conceptually non-related or only tenuously related objects are merged the resultant blend may be experienced as a conceptual clash, it is exactly this latter type of blends that is more often than not repudiated and castigated as a linguistic aberration not worthy of becoming a denizen of language as a system.
Some of the early blended formations have been recorded and elaborated upon by "The New York Times" as early as 1913. The author of the article underlines, however that the majority of blended coinages are fanciful creations by cartoonists rather then nominations of new realia. It seems that the most popular fantasy of those early cartoonists was represented by hybrid animals for which they, logically, coined hybrid words. The question that still remains to be answered is whether it is the words that appear first in the authors' imagination or whether they first conceive of the hybrids and then think up words for them.
"All Portmanteau land is agog with delight. Two new words have been added to its vocabulary. One is an American invention "bungaloafer", signifying a gentleman who takes his ease in his bungalow. ...there are interesting specimens who owe their paternity to George du
Maurier. In a famous Punch cartoon (the result of a careful study of certain theories which have been recently sprung upon an astonished world by Charles Darwin) Mr. du Maurier purported to give a prophetic glimpse of what familiar animals might become if the process of modification by natural selection were indefinitely extended. So he furnished pictorial embodiments of such engaging additions to domestic fauna as the dogupine, the crocodachshund, and the hedge dog, not to mention other hybrids too complex to have their names telescoped into a single word.
In the same vein of humor a more recent English artist, Alick P.F Ritchle allowed his imagination to run riot in a series of pictures contributed to the Strand Magazine under the general name of "Animal Doubles". This series contained, among others, such fanciful hybrids as the crabbit, the pelicanary, the pussy caterpillar, the kangarooster, and the kangarook, the peacockatoo, and the peacockroach, the cowl, the octopuss, and the hippopotamoose" [3].
Over the years, blends have been gaining in popularity, most of them, however, remain fanciful formations even if they are of terminological character. In the quotidian linguistic tradition blending is regarded as the unique word-building pattern that performs the ludic function, inasmuch as it allows for conceptual integration and as often as not conceptual clashes to emerge. The ludic function is realized because the speaker can juggle both notions and words in any way he thinks fit, as a result a mélange thereof emerges, which is always novel and often facetious.
References
1. Tamiko Azuma, Erica J. Williams, Juliet E. Davie. Paws + cause = pause? Memory load and memory blends in homophone recognition // Psychonomic Bulletin & Review: Bloomington, Indiana University, ed. Robert M. Nosofsky, 2004, 11(4). - P. 723-728
2. Tony Veale, Cristina Butnariu. Harvesting and understanding on-line neologisms // The Creative Language System Group [electronic source] / URL: http://afflatus.ucd.ie/article.do? action=find&code=About%20Us., 2010. - P. 393-416 (date of reference 12.12.2010)
3. The New York Times. - New York, June 22, 1913 [electronic source] / URL: http: //query.nytimes. com/mem/archive -free/pdf?
res=F40D 11FF3A5F13738DDDAB0A94DE405B838DF1D3 (date of reference 13.12.2010)
