Why Do Word Blends with Near-Synonymous Composites Exist and Persist? The Case of Guesstimate, Chillax, Ginormous and Confuzzled

Despite their increasing use, little is known about the purpose of word blends, e.g. chillax, which have near-synonymous composite words (relax and chill). Potential explanations for their existence and persistence include: use in different sentence constructions, to provide unique meaning, and to create interest/identity. Th e current study used a vignette methodology with two-hundred and forty-one students to explore the relevance of such hypotheses for ‘guesstimate’, ‘chillax’, ‘ginormous’, and ‘confuzzled’. Our inconsistent results suggest that the semantics of the word blends may diff er from their composites in very subtle ways. However further work is needed to acknowledge and determine the impact of context upon the use and consequences of these word blends

List of references

The following list of references includes works that are often cited in the studies dealing with blending in English. This bibliography cannot be exhaustive, as the subject is multifaceted and the studies then far too numerous to be listed. The following works or articles are thus suggested readings and other relevant references may of course be added

ENGLISH BLENDS FOUND DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Covid-19 pandemic seems to give us blessing disguise to the size of English vocabulary, one of which is blends. This study aims at describing the types and meanings of English blends found during the Covid-19 pandemic by using blends classification from Mattiello’s theory i.e. morphotatic as well as morphological and graphic. This research belongs to a descriptive qualitative study. The research data are English blends found in 9 articles on websites. The data collection techniques used in this research are documentation and content analysis. Technic of data analysis is carried out in three stages, namely (1) data reduction which is carried out when there are same data, (2) data display which is presented in table, (3) drawing conclusions. The researchers found 49 data of English blends. Morphotactically, the researchers found 11 total blends (with 2 blends forming processes) and 38 partial blends (with 3 blends forming processes). Morphologically and graphically, the researchers found 7 overlapping blends and 42 non-overlapping blends

#Bieber + #Blast = #BieberBlast: Early Prediction of Popular Hashtag Compounds

Compounding of natural language units is a very common phenomena. In this paper, we show, for the first time, that Twitter hashtags which, could be considered as correlates of such linguistic units, undergo compounding. We identify reasons for this compounding and propose a prediction model that can identify with 77.07% accuracy if a pair of hashtags compounding in the near future (i.e., 2 months after compounding) shall become popular. At longer times T = 6, 10 months the accuracies are 77.52% and 79.13% respectively. This technique has strong implications to trending hashtag recommendation since newly formed hashtag compounds can be recommended early, even before the compounding has taken place. Further, humans can predict compounds with an overall accuracy of only 48.7% (treated as baseline). Notably, while humans can discriminate the relatively easier cases, the automatic framework is successful in classifying the relatively harder cases.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, 9 tables, published in CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing) 2016. in Proceedings of 19th ACM conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2016

Podem máquinas criar sinais?

A utilização constante de novas tecnologias faz parte do nosso cotidiano. Muitas delas, frutos de pesquisas acadêmicas, não contaram com aprova- ção imediata, recebendo questionamentos sobre sua utilidade e desempenho. Este trabalho trata da evolução conjunta da Linguística e da Vomputação e de como veem contribuindo para o desenvolvi- mento da língua e, nesse âmbito, para a constru- ção de neologismos, valendo-se de marcos teó- ricos que enfatizam o questionamento levantado. Na busca pela compreensão do desenvolvimento da Linguística por meio de modelos computacionais permitindo o processamento de grandes volumes de informações, se faz necessário com- preender: o processo de nomeação do indivíduo, resultando em produção teórica na área da Lin- guística, permitindo inferir em um futuro próximo, no desenvolvimento das línguas de sinais. Esse artigo evidencia o quanto a Computação e a Lin- guística juntas promovem responsabilidade social, na medida em que possibilitam, aos falantes de línguas de sinais, o acesso às diversas esferas aca- dêmicas.</div

Morphemization of truncated lexical bases in present-day English:lexicological and lexicographic aspects

Ova disertacija se bavi procesom  morfemizacije krnjih osnova koje su nastale od leksičkihslivenica. Rekurzivinim slivanjem s različitim inicijalnim elementima, ove osnove se konsoliduju u svom skraćenom obliku ili oblicima, što za rezultat ima separaciju novih tvorbenih jedinica. Najbitniji ciljevi istraživanja su sledeći: da se utvrdi teorijski i terminološki status ovih elementa i odrede kriterijumi za njihovo članstvo u ovoj kategoriji; da se na osnovu tih kriterijuma napravi popis morfemizovanih elemenata uz razvoj metodologije potrebne za njihovu ekscerpciju; da se sačini spisak leksema u kojima se javljaju; da se ustanove formalne varijacije i njihova relativna učestalost kao i tipovi i oblici inicijalnih elementa sa kojima se kombinuju, što bi za rezultat imalo formulisanje prototipskog tvorbenog modela; da istraži značenje ovih elemenata, eventualni razvoj novih semema i smisaonih odnosa; da dâ pregled njihove zastupljenosti u postojećim rečnicima; da predloži model njihove leksikografske obrada i da se na osnovu tog predloga sačini rečnik kako morfemizovanih krnjih osnova, tako i reči u kojima se javljaju.This dissertation investigates the process of AB morphemization of truncated bases which have originated from lexical blends. Through their recurrent blending with various initial elements, they become consolidated in their truncated form or forms, resulting in the secretion of new word-formational units. The most important goals of the research are the following: to determine the theoretical and terminological status of these elements and establish the criteria for category membership; to compile a list of morphemized elements based on these criteria by developing the methodology for their extraction; to compile a list of lexemes containing these newly morphemized elements; to determine formal variations and their relative frequency as well as the types and forms of initial elements with which they combine, resulting in theformulation of the prototypical word-formation pattern; to investigate the meaning of these elements and the development of new senses and sense relations; to give an overview of their representation in existing dictionaries; to propose a model for their lexicographic treatment and to apply that model in the compilation of a specialized dictionary of morphemized truncated bases and words in which they appear

Blend formation tendencies, from English to Arabic : a comparative study

PhD ThesisBlending in English is a widely recognized means for forming new lexemes by joining two or more existing words in a way where at least one of them is shortened (Algeo 1991: 10). Familiar examples are brunch from breakfast and lunch, slanguage from slang and language, and chortle from chuckle and snort (Algeo 1977: 49). Linguistic studies of English blends – which are numerous – have focused in particular on the three following features of blends: the cut-off point in the source words, the proportional contributions from the source words to the blend, and the stress pattern of the blend. The main aim of the present research is to examine Arabic blends in the light of the blend formation tendencies that have been identified with respect to these features in English. Blends in Classical Arabic are generally formed by joining the first two root consonants of each source word and imposing the prosodic pattern CaCCaC on them. Typical examples of Classical Arabic blends are /ʕabdar(ij)/ 'someone from the family of Abdul Dār' < /ʕabd/ 'slave' and /da:r/ 'house', /ʕabqas(ij)/ 'someone from the family of Abdul Qays' < /ʕabd/ 'slave' and /qajs/ 'a male name', and /ʕabʃam(ij)/ 'someone from the family of Abdi Shams' < /ʕabd/ 'slave' and /ʃams/ 'sun'– all names for Arab tribes in the 6th Century AD. However, such Classical blends are few in number. The more numerous blends that have been formed in Arabic in recent times do not appear to follow this root-and-pattern template. Examples are /fawsʕawt(ij)/ 'supersonic' < /fawq/ 'above' and /sʕawt(ij)/ 'sound', and /qabħarb/ 'pre-war' < /qabl/ 'before' and /ħarb/ 'war'. Since no linguistic study has investigated in depth the structure of modern Arabic blends, the main aim of this thesis is to uncover the regularities that are found in these modern formations and in that way contribute to understanding the structure of Arabic words in general and blends in particular. The main research question in this study is: To what extent do the blend formation tendencies identified in English apply to blend formation in Arabic? The data for Arabic come from published resources as well as a survey and an experiment, both designed to collect some novel blends by asking native speakers of Arabic to form blends from a list of word pairs. These data were examined in light of the main features and tendencies related to blend-formation in English. The overall result of the investigation is that there is a high degree of resemblance between modern Arabic blends and English blends. This is the case for both the established Modern Arabic blends and the novel invented blends. In this respect, they differ notably from the established blends of Classical Arabic. The main tendencies for forming Arabic blends that have been identified in this study are: (1) There is a general tendency for the cut-off points in source words to occur at syllabic joints with the greatest preference for them to occur between syllabic constituents. (2) There is a general tendency for the greater proportional contribution to come from the shorter source word, and for source words of equal phonemic lengths to contribute equal proportions to the blend. (3) There is a general tendency for the stress pattern of the blend to be identical to that of the source word that has identical syllabic size as that of the blend.the Directorate of Scholarships and Cultural Relations of the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Researc