Lexical Blending in Romanian Academic Dictionaries

Abstract

Lexical blending has been viewed in Romanian linguistics only as a spontaneous and involuntary process, whereby two (near-)synonyms are fused together into a hybrid form. However, not all the lexical blends recorded in the main Romanian academic dictionaries (DA-DLR, DEX, DELR) conform to this mainstream view, as the dictionaries record a small number of deliberate blends, as well as other types of speech error blends. We analysed 560 along several criteria, such as: the blending patterns, i.e., the way in which their source-words are clipped and combined, the phonological contour, i.e., the metric pattern of the blend as compared to its source-words, the overlapping segments, the semantic relation between the source-words, and also the semantic relation between the blend and the source-words. In all these respects, there are significant differences between the speech error blends and the deliberate ones, as the speech errors tend to combine source-words that are more similar to each other, and render opaquer outputs, whereas deliberate blends tend to clip less and thus increase source-word recognizability.