Unpacking contemporary English blends: Morphological structure, meaning, processing by Natalia Beliaeva A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Victoria University of Wellington (2014) Abstract 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 iii 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. iv Acknowledgements This thesis primarily concerns my contribution to the knowledge about blends. This contribution, however, seems tiny in comparison to the amount of knowledge and experience I acquired during my PhD journey. These were given to me by the people who surrounded me at various stages of this project to a much greater extent than taken from books and journals. To all these people, I express my heartfelt gratitude. First of all, I am grateful to my primary supervisor, Professor Laurie Bauer, who did much more for this research project than fulfil his supervisory duties. His friendly support, inspiring feedback, and his genuine interest not only in the formation of blends, but also in my own formation as an independent researcher have been crucial for the progress of this thesis. I am also indebted to my secondary supervisor, Associate Professor Paul Warren, who provided extremely valuable feedback at all the stages of the experimental part of this project, and whose comments on my writing inspired me to address the trickiest aspects of statistical analysis instead of avoiding them. I am further grateful to Dr. Anna Siyanova, who agreed to join the supervisory team when this project was well under way. Her expertise in experimental studies was very valuable for shaping my own experimental methodology. I am also very grateful to her for positive attitude to all aspects of my work, which was vital for getting me through bumps on this road. I would like to add a special thank you to Professor Ingo Plag, who provided stimulating feedback and advice at a crucial stage of my PhD, and who introduced me to the exciting world of statistical analysis in R. I also wish to thank my examiners Prof. Jen Hay, Dr Paula López Rúa and Dr. Carolyn Wilshire for their genuine interest in my work and their insightful comments. I would like to thank all the staff of School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies for being a lively, inspiring and supportive academic community. I also thank the School for providing opportunities to gain teaching experience, and I must confess that I learned at least as much from the courses I worked on as the students did. I am grateful to all the teaching and the administrative staff of SLALS for making life at the School easier in all sorts of ways, from sorting out administrative issues smoothly and almost unnoticeably, to relaxing conversations over innumerable cups of coffee we had together. And, of course, I am sincerely grateful to my fellow PhD students Anna Piasecki, Sharon Marsden, Ewa Kusmierczyk, Kieran File, Keely Kidner, TJ Boutorwick, Deborah Chua and many others, who provided valuable feedback during the exciting sessions of the thesis v group, and who helped make Wellington my second home. A special thanks to Liza Tarasova, for making my landing in New Zealand as soft as it could possibly be. This research project would not have been possible without the financial support of the grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand through its Marsden Fund to Laurie Bauer, and also without the research grants of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Undertaking this research project would be much less exciting and much more solitary without the support of my family and friends both in New Zealand and in Russia. I would like to thank Dr Elena Myagkova, who first inspired my interest in linguistic research, and Dr Vera Pishchalnikova, my mentor and supervisor of the Candidate of Philological Sciences thesis. Words can hardly express my gratitude to my parents for their love and support, and to my husband Aleksandr and my daughter Polina for constantly reminding me there is life outside the PhD. You gave me much more than I could ever give back. Thank you. vi Papers and presentations derived from this research Journal papers: Beliaeva, N. (2014). A study of English blends: From structure to meaning and back again. Word Structure, 7(1), 29–54. Conference presentations: Beliaeva, N. (2012). The chemistry of blends: How people merge words together. Presented at the 2nd Auckland Postgraduate Conference on Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Auckland, June 30. Beliaeva, N. (2012). The power of slanguage: Form and meaning of English blends. Presented at the Data-Rich Approaches to English Morphology, Wellington, July 4–6. Beliaeva, N. (2012). The power of slanguage: Conceptual integration on the word formation level. Presented at the 4th UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference, London, July 10–12. Beliaeva, N. (2013). From phonology to morphology, from morphology to semantics: A study of English blends. Presented at Morphology and its Interfaces, Lille, September 12–13. vii viii Contents Abstract.............................................................................................................................................................. iii Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................................... v Papers and presentations derived from this research ................................................................... vii List of tables ................................................................................................................................................... xiii List of figures .................................................................................................................................................. xv Chapter 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 1.1. Background and motivation of the thesis ............................................................................ 1 1.2. Aims of the thesis .......................................................................................................................... 2 1.3. The structure of the thesis ......................................................................................................... 3 Chapter 2. The dramality