When Word-Formation Processes Overlap: Making Up 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; Stockwell and Minkova, 2001; Ayto, 2003; Gries, 2004; Szymanek, 2005; Vaccarelli, 2008; Renner et al, 2012; Mattiello, 2013). The distinctive feature of blending, which is at the root of the spread of some new coinages, is that at least one of the words entering into the blend after being in some way truncated is clearly recoverable. As highlighted by some scholars, phonological aspects are highly relevant to blending success; in fact, “phonological similarity of the blend with part or whole source words increases the likelihood or felicity (the ‘goodness’) of a blend” (Kemmer 2003). Nonetheless, word-formation processes do not act apart, but they interrelate each other and often overlap (Haspelmath 1995). As Bauer (1983) points out, also the category of blending is not well-defined, since it tends to shade off into other word-formation processes, such as compounding, neoclassical compounding, affixation and acronymy. 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. Some examples are the suffix -teria from the word cafeteria, agri- from agriculture, (a)-holic from alcoholic, e- from electronic, euro- from European, -nomics from economics, -pedia from encyclopedia, -topia from utopia. According to some sources, these elements should be termed, more appropriately, combining forms (Szymanek 2005, Mattiello 2008), affix-like forms (Fradin 2000), or splinters (Bauer et al. 2013). 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 three updated dictionaries (OALD, 9th ed., MED, 2nd ed., Collins English Dictionary) and checking the presence of these lemmas in two online newspapers, one British and one American – i.e., The Telegraph and The Washington Post, thus carrying out both a qualitative and a quantitative analysis of these new coinages, particularly focusing on political topics.