Blending

Abstract

This overview of lexical blending includes a definitional discussion, an appraisal of the role of English in its increased frequency in a variety of languages, a taxonomic outline of key types and subtypes, and a focus on two issues of debate – the grammatical or extragrammatical status of blended outputs and the inclusion or exclusion of items made of two initial word fragments. It concludes that two prototypical formal‐cum‐functional strategies of blend formation can be sketched – an associative strategy of novel naming preferably encoded by A{B|C|∅}D constructs and a syntagmatic strategy of compacted renaming preferably encoded by AC constructs.