CC BY
71
Лаврова Н.А.
Кандидат филологических наук, доцент, ФГБОУ ВПО МПГУ «Московский педагогический государственный университет»
TOWARDS BLENDING AS A WORD-BUILDING PATTERN
Аннотация
В настоящей статье показано, что блендинг (контаминация) рассматривается как словообразовательная модель, типичная для английского языка, что обусловлено одноморфемной структурой слова и отсутствием флексий. В статье анализируются структура, семантика, прототипические черты, а также наиболее распространенные тематические группы блендов. Новизна статьи обусловлена рассмотрением контаминантов в качестве элементов секретного, тайного языка некоторых субкультур.
Ключевые слова: блендинг, слова-источники, прототипические характеристики,
тематические группы
Keywords: blending, source words, prototypical features, thematic groups
As a word-building pattern blending became wide-spread some time ago in English and, indeed, in some other European languages, such as German (Agitproperette: Agitprop + Operette; alternatief: alternativ + tief; Arbeitslosgewinn: arbeitlos + der Losgewinn), French (aberrifique: aberrant + horrifique; agendarme: agent + gendarme), Italian (fubbia: fumo + nebbia; impumone: imputato + testimone; pantacollant: pantaloni + collant), Russian (акуласточка, пианиночь, рыбатоны, кабанка, мимозамок*). Out of the languages mentioned, however, English reveals a much more pronounced inclination to form blends out of its resources. This can be explained by the analytical structure of English and the fact that blend words were first conceived of on English soil. Blend formations exhibit universal as well as peculiar features in every language. Universal features of blending are manifest on different levels: on the level of discourse - blends are wide-spread in the belles-lettres, publicist, advertising and scientific discourse, apart from that, lexical blends are particularly frequent in such domains as humour and denomination of enterprises or new products; on the level of morphology - blends predominantly consist of two source words, with the source words being mostly nouns; on the levels of semantics - blends are metaphorical, imagery-filled formations that are, more often than not, of occasional character. Some of the prototypical features the majority of blends reveal are as follows: 1. They tend to be organized in such a way that the shorter and more frequent word becomes the first member of the blend (M.H. Kelly “To ‘Brunch’ or to ‘Brench’: Some Aspects of Blend Structure”, 1998). 2. The number of their syllables hardly ever exceeds the number of syllables in the longer source-word (G. Cannon “Blends in English word-formation”, 1986). 3. They retain the same stress that that occurs on one of the source words (G. Cannon “Historical Change and English Word-formation”, 1987). 4. They tend to have at least two syllables, with at least one deriving from each source word (Q. Bat-El “Selecting the best of the worst: The grammar of Hebrew blends”, 1996).
This universality of features, however, is realized in different ways in different languages, and so we can say that all blends, if they are not international or are direct borrowings from some source language, are culturally-determined, with the entailment that their interpretation depends on speakers’ background knowledge and presuppositions. English culturally determined blends are represented by the following thematic groups:
- social and political spheres (Chindia, Europreneurs, pandaplomacy);
- sports (shamateur);
- mass media (ambush, bushonomics, fuelishness);
- toponyms (Mexicalo - Mexico + California; Ohiowa - Ohio + Iowa; Texarcana - Texas + Arkansas);
- blends that are baby-names (Olabelle - Ola + Isabel; Bethene - Elizabeth + Christine; Oluise - Olive + Louise; Adrielle - Adrienne + Belle; Birdene - Birdie + Pauline);
- blends that are names of couples (Vaughniston - Vince Vaughn + Jennifer Aniston; Billary - Bill + Hillary Clinton);
- terms (zircalloy - zirconium + alloy; glasphalt - glass + asphalt; elevon - elevator + aileron).
Studies of blending have revealed a few different terms that are used to denote this word-building pattern, such as “contamination”, “telescoping”, “portmanteau”, “fusion”, “hybrid words”, etc. In English all of the terms are used more or less synonymously, the most prevalent being “blend” and “blending”. The classical and the most conservative term for this phenomenon is “contamination”, which was introduced and elaborated on by H. Paul. “Portmanteau” was the term suggested and popularized by L. Carroll; “blend” was the term preferred by L. Pound and
H. Marchand.
As regards the structure of blends, a specific type of blends can be singled out in English, namely, phrasal blends. A caveat must made here as regards the term “phrasal blends”: it is rather arbitrary and to a certain extent a notational term adopted for the sake of convenience. The components of phrasal blends do not form a word-combination proper: they may be represented by an analytical form of the verb or by a sentence and are mostly colloquialisms whose usage is typical of family members: e.g. must go - musgos: old or mouldy food that belongs in a bin; pipimist - pip he missed - a foreign object in a drink; ashew - as you go up, etc. [2, 18-19].
The question of whether the meaning of blends can be traced down to the sum of the meanings of their components still remains an unresolved issue. The propabilistic answer is that different blends exhibit different patterns and degrees of compositionality, the minority being shortened versions of an attributive word-combination, such as medicare, Amerindian, trafficator. The majority of blends, however, are not the contracted synonyms of a free word-combination: the speaker fuses words that do not form a prefabricated word-combination. Arguably, for this purpose an abbreviation would be more efficient and is in reality resorted to: e.g. MP, BBC, NATO. The importance of distinguishing between a blend which is a new lexeme and a blend which is a shorter stylistic variant of a pre-existing word-combination can be crucial for trade-marks, where it is often decided that the meaning and structure of a blend equal the meaning and structure of its components, hence a blend is regarded as a variant of a word-combination. There has been a precedent in trade-mark nominations when the organization “Projections Mapping Group Inc.” asked a linguist, Thomas M. Paikeday, whether the tradename “Spatialist”, “Kanotech”’s invention, is not the same variant of the compound “Spatial Analyst”, and if so, whether it should be banned from being registered as a trademark since “Spatial Analyst” predates it. The lexicographer’s answer was that not only is “Spatialist” confusingly similar to “Spatial Analyst”, but the former is an obviously shortened form of the latter and hence the property of the owners of “Spatial Analyst”. M. Paikeday’s summary and conclusion are as follows. Blending is not the same as shortening proper, although a certain curtailment of words and morphemes does take place. Blending as well as shortening results from people’s natural need to economize and capitalize on their time and effort, and so they make a beeline for the destination. This beeline can be compared to a shortcut through one’s own property, hence, if somebody else makes or discovers one, the path still belongs to the owner. Intellectual property can be compared to real property in regard to its boundaries: whoever trespasses them, should apologize or pay for the trespass, and ultimately - discard and forgo the usage of the shortcut. It follows that a blend should belong to the owners of the original phrasal compound used as a trademark, the resemblance between a blend and its motivating word-combination being too
apparent to be ignored. “Spatialist”, therefore, rightfully belongs to the owners of “Spatial Analyst” (Thomas M. Paikeday).
One of the works devoted to the comparison of blends’ syllabic structure in four European languages is Pier Marco Bertinetto’s “Blends and syllabic structure: a four-fold comparison” (2000), where blends are treated both as a word formation device and as a type of spontaneous speech error. The scholar argues that lexical blends are an old phenomenon, known since the times of Classical Greek. Not all languages, however, are equally well-geared to accepting this process of word formation: Pier Marco Bertinetto admits that he failed to find a single example of a Spanish blend, despite consulting a few Spanish colleagues and being sure that there ought to be some. Going by P.M. Bertinetto’s data, English, German, French and to a lesser extent Italian resort to blending fairly often.
Intentional lexical blends differ in a number of ways from blend errors. According to Th. Berg, “The first type [lexical blends] is created to meet a particular communicative need, the second [blend errors] is a derailment of the psycholinguistic system without any communicative function or purpose <.. .> it is to be expected that intentional blends are subject to the same basic constraints as unintentional ones, <...> these constraints should be less pronounced <...> in willful language patterns than in slips of the tongue. This is because speakers’ intentions may reduce, but not annul, the impact of the processing principles” [3, 152]. To put it differently, the subconscious and to a greater degree automatic production of a word is governed by rules that impose a strong bias on the resultant word structure-wise, while an act of creation may be performed in ways that consciously flout phonotactic, morphemic and other rules.
A summative and clarifying article on blends and blending is by Stefan Th. Gries “Quantitative corpus data on blend formation: psycho-and cognitive-linguistic perspectives”. The article presents a variety of case studies concerned with the effects of similarity and recognizability on the formation of blends. Stefan Th. Gries ascribes the following attributes to English blends:
- they are not as rule-governed as derivational processes;
- are not as productive as most derivational processes;
- are more creative than most derivational processes;
- involve conscious effort and word play on the part of the coiner, which often results in ‘violations’ of more rigid morphological rules and includes the ‘integration’ of many kinds of information that are not central to linguistic study;
- they exhibit similarity to other intentional word-formation processes (e.g. compounding, (complex) clipping, abbreviations, acronyms);
- they have an unplanned counterpart in the form of speech-error blends (Stefan Th. Gries, electronic source).
According to Stefan Th. Gries, blends, as well as some other linguistic phenomena, are propabilistic and multifactorial in nature. The components of blends reveal a variety of similarity features, be they phonological, syntactic, or semantic. According to Gries, authentic speech error blends exhibit the highest similarity to each other (0.9); similarity of intentional blends, however, is significantly lower (0.4). Source words of intentional blends that have the same number of syllables tend to have the same stress patterns. The most frequently occurring types of semantic relationships between the source words of blends are the following: synonymy (appeteasing -appetizing + teasing); co-hyponymy (Labradoodle - Labrador + poodle); contractive (carjacking
- car + hijacking; skurfing - sky + surfing); frame relation (confrotalk - confrontation + talk; letterzine - letter + magazine); other (antonymy, etc.). The most frequent type of relationship exhibited by both intentional and speech error blends is that of synonymy. Source words of blends exhibit different lengths: the second source word is significantly longer that the first one (about half a syllable and one phoneme). In the creation of a blend the speaker tends to organize its components in the modifier-head order or to put the shorter and more frequent word first.
The morphological boundary between the components of a blend is usually at the so-called “uniqueness point”, the point at which the curtailed word can be recognized as such and is hard to confuse with other words that share the same graphemes with it. To clarify this point, let us furnish the source word “American”, which, fused with the source word “Indian”, forms the blend “Amerindian”. The hypothetical blends “Amindian” and “Amdian” are excluded because in the former example the first source word is not informative enough, and in the latter - the curtailment of both components not at their uniqueness point makes the blend’s structure and semantics opaque and hard to recognize. In other word, the curtailment of “American” at the point of “Ameri-” narrows down the range of possible words it could be part of to almost a single one - “American”. The same applies to the other source word.
One area of fruitful investigation in terms of blend formation is furnished by subcultures, namely, their clandestine and secretive language, where blends seem to be seamlessly used. Some such subcultures are represented by Rastafarians and members of the Ku Klux Klan. As is known, Rastafarians are a group among the African Caribbean community who regard Haile Selassie, the former emperor of Ethiopoia, whose Amharic title was ‘Ras Tafari’, as an incarnation of God (Jah). Rastafarian culture is acutely conscious of the positive and negative connotations of words, and so adapts words to change their connotations, a process during which blends are prolifically created: e.g. “crelove” (create + love) for “create”; “apprecilove” (appreciate + love) for “appreciate”. One of the frequent components of Rastafarian blends is the personal pronoun “I”, whose significance is explained by J. Bones in the following way: “We are told that in the context of grammar ‘I’ is the first-person pronoun and that the latter takes the place of a noun. We also know that other personal pronouns (you, he, she, they) are second- and third-person pronouns. Rastas say that this is a reflection of a class society where the blacks are seen as ‘you’, ‘they’ and so forth but never as ‘I’. But since ‘I’ is the first person singular, ‘I’ is Jah Rastafari.. .the one and only. Jah is black, so it follows that ‘I’ is black. Black, Jah and ‘I’ are now interchangeable terms, each meaning the same as the other. Each Rastaman is a ‘Jahman’; equally each ‘jahman’ is an ‘I-man’. Hence an ‘I-man’ is also a ‘you-man’ (or ‘human’). Now the ‘I-man’ is different from the ‘you-man’ of the ‘me-man’ because he is the first person. So since Rasta is ‘I’, a plurality of Rastas become ‘I-n-I’” [5, 46]. Consequently, “I” becomes frequently used as a component of blends: “Iration” (creation), “Igini” (beginning).
The clandestine activities of the Ku Klux Klan were also marked by the number of blend words used to refer to some important notions (Jackson H., Ze Amvela E., 2007). Some examples include: “the Kloran” (the Klan’s Bible), “klavern” (klan + tavern), “klavaliers” (klan + cavaliers).
The present article demonstrates that blending is a word-building pattern found in a number of European languages whose typology admits of clipping and compound, for blending can simplistically be conceived of as a combination of those two processes, although it is quite distinct from both and is not reducible to either. English seems to be the language where blending enjoys the most popularity, partially because the writer who popularized it was also an Englishman. Despite a number of revealing articles on blending written by some distinguished scholars, this word-building pattern is still described in probabilistic, multifactorial and sometimes confusing terms (see the number of synonyms mentioned above). Prone to a number of exceptions, blending exhibits such universal features as occasional, ad hoc character; facetious colouring, conscious creativity on the part of the speaker (if blends are not speech errors), a tendency to be used in advertising and in journalistic articles, where they are overwhelmingly placed in the text prominent position - in a headline. The structure of most blends is such as to render at least one of the source words transparent and interpretable. However, even if both source words are transparent and identifiable, the meaning of most blends is metaphoric and idiomatic, an argument which is supported by the fact that blending receives popularity with the
secretive and clandestine languages of subcultures, where blends serve either as a password or are expressive and evaluative synonyms of standard words.
*Examples are taken from the book by O. Zhukova (О. Жукова, 2010), where blending is used as part of methods of teaching children to read and write.
Литература
1. Жукова О. Большой подарок будущему отличнику. - М.: Астрель; СПб.: Астрель-СПб, 2010. - 159 с.
2. Хрущева О.А. Универсальные и лингвокультурные особенности блендинга: Автореф. дис.. .канд. филол. наук. - Челябинск, 2011. - 22 с.
3. Berg Th. Linguistic structure and change: an explanation from language processing. - Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. - 379 p.
4. Bertinetto P.M. Blends and syllabic structure: a four-fold comparison. In / M. Lorente, N. Alturo, E. Boix, M.R. Llorette & L. Payrato (Eds.) La grammatica i la semantica per en l’estudi de la variacio. - Barcelona: Promociones y Publicaciones Universitaries, 2000. - P. 55-112
5. Bones J. Language and Rastafari, in: Sutcliffe D., Wong A. (eds.) / The language of the Black Experience: Blackwell, 1986. - P. 37-51
6. Gries. Stefan Th. Quantitative corpus data on blend formation: psycho-and cognitive-linguistic
perspectives (electronic source) / URL:
http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/stgries/research/Blends_LyonVol.pdf (date of reference 07.03.2011)
7. Jackson H., Ze Amvela E. Words, Meaning and Vocabulary. An Introduction to Modern English Lexicology. - New York, London: Continuum, 2010. - 248 p.
8. Paikeday Thomas M. “Spatialist” as a blend of “Spatial Analyst” (electronic source) / URL: http://www.paikeday.net/trademarkaffidavitspage1.htm (date of reference 07.03.2011)
