Ukrainian Blends: Elicitation paradigm and structural analysis

Borgwaldt, Susanne; Kulish, T V; Bose, Arpita

doi:10.1515/9783110289572.75

“…Since lexical blending is specific to English and the English influence seems to be the driving force for the increased productivity of lexical blending in other languages, and since little, if anything has been said about Romanian lexical blending as a word formation process, thus implying that compounding would be used in naming hybrid objects, our hypothesis was that Romanian native speakers with an above-average knowledge of English would produce more blends in English, but more compounds and fewer blends (if any) in Romanian. To test our hypothesis, we used a hybrid-object naming task (Borgwaldt, Kulish, Bose 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Romanian lexical blending: from zero to hero

Vasileanu¹,

Niculescu-Gorpin²,

Radu-Bejenaru³

2022

Proceedings of International Conference of Experimental Linguistics

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In an elicitation experiment, 109 Romanian native subjects were presented with 50 pictures of hybrid objects, e.g. a half-orange, half-pear fruit, and were asked to name each object using a single word either in Romanian or in English. 64.66% of the elicited English words were blends, thus confirming the expected tendency towards using blends in English; unexpectedly, the same tendency was observed for Romanian with 68.50% blends. In Romanian linguistics, lexical blending has been seldom mentioned, interest resting only in speech errors, and not in the deliberate phenomenon as a fullyfledged word formation process of Romanian morphology. We believe that our data analysis suggests a shift in Romanian word formation tendencies, possibly under the pervasive influence of English.

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“…In contrast to this, in an experiment with Ukrainian participants using the same picture stimuli, 55% of the hybrid names were classified as blends and clipping compounds (out of which 10% were clipping compounds). Analysing the Ukrainian data, Borgwaldt et al (2012) investigate the structure of the blends and compare their features to the ones in other corpora of lexical blends. In the Ukrainian data, the first source word of blends was on average longer than the second one, which had been observed before as a characteristic of speech error blends, but not intentional blends (Borgwaldt et al, 2012, p. 90).…”

Section: Stillborn-fruit)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The studies described in Borgwaldt et al (2012) and Arndt- Lappe and Plag (2013) involved experiments in which respondents were either explicitly or implicitly asked to create blends. The data from these experiments allow inferences to be made about the factors which influence the formation of blends in language.…”

Section: Stillborn-fruit)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Unpacking contemporary English blends: Morphological structure, meaning, processing

Beliaeva¹

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<p>It is not coincidental that blend words (e. g. nutriceutical ← nutricious + pharmaceutical, blizzaster ← blizzard + disaster) are more and more often used in media sources. In a blend, two (or sometimes more) words become one compact and attention-catching form, which is at the same time relatively transparent, so that the reader or listener can still recognise several constituents in it. These features make blends one of the most intriguing types of word formation. At the same time, blends are extremely challenging to study. A classical morpheme-based morphological description is not suitable for blends because their formation does not involve morphemes as such. This implies two possible approaches: either to deny blends a place in regular morphology (as suggested in Dressler (2000), for example), or to find grounds for including them into general morphological descriptions and theories (as was done, using different frameworks, in López Rúa (2004b), Gries (2012), Arndt-Lappe and Plag (2013) and other studies). The growing number of blends observed in various media sources indicates that this phenomenon is an important characteristic of the living contemporary language, and therefore, blends cannot be ignored in a morphological description of the English language (and many other typologically different languages). Moreover, I believe that the general morphological theory has to embrace blends because of the vast amount of regularity observed in their formation, despite their incredible diversity. The formation of blends involves both addition and subtraction, which relates them both to compounds and to clippings. This research aims to clarify the morphological status of blends in relation to the neighbouring word formation categories, in particular, to the so-called clipping compounds (e.g. digicam ← digital + camera). To approach this problem, I compiled a collection of English neologisms formed by merging two (in some cases, more) words into one, and analysed their formal and semantic properties. The results of this analysis were used to distinguish between blends and clipping compounds, and also to justify the classification of blends according to different degrees of formal transparency (using the principles of Lehrer’s (1996, 2007) classification). The strength of the association between blends (or clipping compounds) and their source words was then assessed in two experiments: an online survey involving evaluating definitions of blends and clipping compounds, and a psycholinguistic experiment involving a production and a lexical decision task. The experimental findings show that recognisability of the source words of blends and clipping compounds has significant influence both on the evaluation of their definitions and on their processing. The main implication of the experimental results is that blends, unlike clipping compounds, are closer to compounds than to clippings. In addition to this, significant differences are revealed between blends containing full source words and blends containing only parts of them. Therefore, the structural type of blend, as defined in this study, is a factor which has strong influence on the processing of blends and their source words.</p>

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“…Two examples are experiments during which the participants were asked to name non-existing hybrid objects shown in pictures. The experiments were carried out in German and Hungarian (Borgwaldt and Benczes, 2011) and, later, in Ukrainian (Borgwaldt et al, 2012). The semantics of the blends created in the course of the experiments was restricted by the underlying semantics of the input stimuli.…”

Section: Stillborn-fruit)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a result, a number of studies (e.g. Bryant, 1974;Cannon, 1986;Borgwaldt et al, 2012) exclude clipping compounds from their scope on purely formal grounds, that is, because clipping compounds include the initial part of the second source word, unlike more frequently encountered blends which include the final part or the whole of the second source word.…”

Section: The Design Of This Research Revisitedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unpacking contemporary English blends: Morphological structure, meaning, processing

Beliaeva¹

3

0

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<p>It is not coincidental that blend words (e. g. nutriceutical ← nutricious + pharmaceutical, blizzaster ← blizzard + disaster) are more and more often used in media sources. In a blend, two (or sometimes more) words become one compact and attention-catching form, which is at the same time relatively transparent, so that the reader or listener can still recognise several constituents in it. These features make blends one of the most intriguing types of word formation. At the same time, blends are extremely challenging to study. A classical morpheme-based morphological description is not suitable for blends because their formation does not involve morphemes as such. This implies two possible approaches: either to deny blends a place in regular morphology (as suggested in Dressler (2000), for example), or to find grounds for including them into general morphological descriptions and theories (as was done, using different frameworks, in López Rúa (2004b), Gries (2012), Arndt-Lappe and Plag (2013) and other studies). The growing number of blends observed in various media sources indicates that this phenomenon is an important characteristic of the living contemporary language, and therefore, blends cannot be ignored in a morphological description of the English language (and many other typologically different languages). Moreover, I believe that the general morphological theory has to embrace blends because of the vast amount of regularity observed in their formation, despite their incredible diversity. The formation of blends involves both addition and subtraction, which relates them both to compounds and to clippings. This research aims to clarify the morphological status of blends in relation to the neighbouring word formation categories, in particular, to the so-called clipping compounds (e.g. digicam ← digital + camera). To approach this problem, I compiled a collection of English neologisms formed by merging two (in some cases, more) words into one, and analysed their formal and semantic properties. The results of this analysis were used to distinguish between blends and clipping compounds, and also to justify the classification of blends according to different degrees of formal transparency (using the principles of Lehrer’s (1996, 2007) classification). The strength of the association between blends (or clipping compounds) and their source words was then assessed in two experiments: an online survey involving evaluating definitions of blends and clipping compounds, and a psycholinguistic experiment involving a production and a lexical decision task. The experimental findings show that recognisability of the source words of blends and clipping compounds has significant influence both on the evaluation of their definitions and on their processing. The main implication of the experimental results is that blends, unlike clipping compounds, are closer to compounds than to clippings. In addition to this, significant differences are revealed between blends containing full source words and blends containing only parts of them. Therefore, the structural type of blend, as defined in this study, is a factor which has strong influence on the processing of blends and their source words.</p>

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Ukrainian Blends: Elicitation paradigm and structural analysis

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Romanian lexical blending: from zero to hero

Romanian lexical blending: from zero to hero

Unpacking contemporary English blends: Morphological structure, meaning, processing

Unpacking contemporary English blends: Morphological structure, meaning, processing

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