Romanian lexical blending: from zero to hero

Abstract

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.