Analysing Blends

Scientific Essay from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, University of Marburg, language: English, abstract: “You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word” (Carroll 2002:186). That is what Humpty Dumpty told Alice about a poem, where words were mixed together out of other words. But not only in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass” words like these occur. If you take a newspaper, you will find a lot of mixtures. One of the most famous of the last years are names like Brangelina oder Bennifer, where popular couples were shortened to one name. These names caught the attention of readers and led to an increasing usage. Some words are part of our language and a division into the original parts becomes difficult. Take brunch as an example. Most people would describe it as a second breakfast, but would they think of a mixture of breakfast and lunch in the first place? Portmanteau words, as Humpty Dumpty calls them, in Linguistics are known as blends. It is a part of morphology which is often discussed, because there are a lot of contradictions. The question arises if there are general rules which can be used to form blends and if there are major categories of blends. The paper will show the most important characteristics of blends and their structure. Furthermore it tries to find some answers to the above mentioned questions and proves or disproves generalisations. With the help of a survey the characteristics shall be looked at in a critical way.