A Detailed Investigation and Perusal of Lexical Blends: Semantics in Blends and Types of Blends and Their Frequency

Lexical blends have long been of interest to those studying English linguistics. There is something fascinating about a word in which different ideas are brought together into a new, integrated concept by simply fusing the corresponding words into a single lexical item. In English, lexical blending is an important source of neologisms, although it is probably true that derivation and compounding are much more frequent processes. Starting in the last few centuries, the creation of new lexical items by blending has become a productive morphological device in its own right, both in written and spoken language, and in recent years its popularity appears to have skyrocketed. The main aim of this paper is to sketch the basics of an explicit analysis of lexical blends in terms of schemas.

The source words of a blend can be indentified easily when there is a semantic relation between them. Blends are composed of two semantically similar words, reflecting a conjunctions of their concepts. A pug and a beagle both being a kind of dog combine to form the blend puggle. An exergame is a blend of exercise and game, both being types of activity. The source words of some blends are not semantically similar but are semantically related. The source words of slanguist (slang and linguist) are related in that slang is a type of language and a linguist studies language. The split of a source word into the prefix/suffix as it contributes to the blend and the remainder of the word occurs at a syllable boundary or immediately after the onset of the syllable.