Overlapping Processes of Word-Formation: Coining New Words through Blending and Affix Secretion

Among the latest trends of English word-formation, blending – that is “the method of merging parts of words into one word, as when sm/oke and f/og derive smog […], a compounding by means of curtailed words” (Marchand 1969) – represents one of the fields of contemporary English where neologisms are quite common, as clearly outlined by many scholars (Bauer 1983; Warren 1990; Fradin 2000; Stockwell and Minkova 2001; Ayto, 2003; Kemmer 2003; Gries 2004; Szymanek 2005; Vaccarelli 2008; Renner et al. 2012; Mattiello 2013). But in general, word-formation processes do not act apart, but they interrelate each other and often overlap (Haspelmath 1995). In particular, this paper aims at focusing on the links between blending and affix secretion. The latter can be defined as a process in which a part of an inseparable word gets a new semantic value, thus becoming a prefix, a suffix or an autonomous word. According to some sources (Szymanek 2005), these elements should be termed, more appropriately, combining forms, or affix-like forms (Fradin 2000). For instance, the suffix -teria, meaning ‘shop, store, establishment’, originally secreted, i.e. separated, from the word cafeteria, and then used more and more freely in new, analogical coinages – such as chocolateria, fruiteria, and the newly-coined words washeteria, used-bookteria. This strategy of taking all sorts of words apart (some newly-emerged affixes of this sort are: agri- from agriculture, (a)-holic from alcoholic, e- from electronic, euro- from European, -nomics from economics, -pedia from encyclopedia, -topia from utopia, etc.) and using the parts to form new words is a very typically English innovation in word-formation. The aim of this paper is to study these new strategies of word-formation from a lexicographic perspective, by looking for the entries created by affix secretion in two updated dictionaries (OALD, 8th ed., MED, 2nd ed.) and checking the presence of these lemmas in two online corpora – the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), thus carrying out both a qualitative and a quantitative analysis of these new coinages.