Lexical Blending as Wordplay

Abstract

This article deals with wordplay in word-formation and centers on lexical blending. It claims that, because of their very formation process, lexical blends are instances of wordplay. Drawing on examples from a variety of languages, it offers a categorization of the different features which may be argued to increase wordplayfulness into five classes: formal complexity, structural transgression, graphic play on words, semantic play on words, and functional ludicity.

Gold Punning: studying multistable meaning structures using a systematically collected set of lexical blends

“…Although truncated according to a common blend pattern, petrodollar resembles rather a clipped modifier and a head, which seems more reasonable to interpret as an instance of compounding. Dollywood, on the other hand, may evoke the concept of Hollywood, but as the segment -wood is quite frequent in US place names (for instance Greenwood, Westwood, Englewood, Fleetwood, Glenwood, Wynwood, Stanwood) the overlap effect, or wordplay function [Renner 2015], was considered too marginal to include dollywood in the list of blends. Nonetheless, both these examples display the well-known difficulties to classify blends on the basis of their form [López Rúa 2004;Beliaeva 2014;Renner 2015].…”

“…The difficulty to collect blends in a systematically stringent manner is likely one reason behind this, and as the title indicates, gold panning is suggested as a metaphor for the hard and time-consuming work to extract lexical blends from a large body of textual data. Importantly, punning, as in Gold Punning, is understood here broadly as a strategy to achieve effects of wordplay which is an intrinsic characteristic of lexical blending [Lehrer 1996;Gries 2006;Alm-Arvius 2012;Renner 2015]. Instantiations range therefore from potentially humorous expressions such as relationsshit (relationship + shit) to more commonplace items such as glocal (global + local).…”

“…Viewpoints range from attitudes assuming that seriality in any form is incompatible with the concept of lexical blending [Fradin 2015] to approaches including most items that display some sort of truncation and fusion of form [Plag 2003;Lehrer 2007]. To address such complex issues of categorization, it has been suggested that a prototype theory perspective is appropriate to account for the complexity of lexical blending [Brdar-Szabó & Brdar 2008;Renner 2015]. Because prototype theory is commonly applied in a Cognitive Linguistics (CL) framework [Taylor 2003;Geeraerts 2006c;Ungerer & Schmid 2006], it seems natural that several accounts have put forth CL as an ideal theoretical outset when studying blends [Kemmer 2003;Gries 2006;Silaški & Đurović 2013].…”

Hybrid Hashtags: #YouKnowYoureAKiwiWhen Your Tweet Contains Māori and English

“…One factor which has been relatively under-represented in the literature on loanwords (but see Macalister, 2002 for a handful of examples from New Zealand English) is the dimension of humor and language play. Language play and creative uses of linguistic resources (see Zirker and Winter-Froemel, 2015 and papers cited within) have been documented in monolingual contexts of word formation (Renner, 2015) and in English-German bilingual puns (Stefanowitsch, 2002;Knospe, 2015), but to our knowledge, they are largely absent from studies of loanwords. Given the link between creativity and bilingualism (see overview in Kharkhurin, 2015), it is perhaps not surprising that loanwords illustrate creative language use and language play.…”

Translating English Wordplay into Serbian: Evidence from Three Dystopian Novels

“…Żyśko (2017: 3-17) adds ambiguity, novelty and humour to this list, while Kabatek (2015: 215) stresses the element of surprise without which wordplay cannot achieve its expressive effect. Renner (2015) in his study of blends as instances of wordplay recognizes the following features which contribute to wordplayfulness: formal complexity, structural transgression, graphic play on words, semantic play on words, and functional ludicity.…”