Keep calm and carry on blending: Experimental insights into Romanian lexical blending

Abstract

Although lexical blending is considered a creative and unpredictable process, the literature shows that it tends to follow certain patterns ( Gries 2012 ; Beliaeva 2019 ), a tendency observed mainly in English. To check whether such generalisations and constraints are the same for Romanian or whether there are language-specific features affecting lexical blending, we created a hybrid-object image-based online experiment asking 110 Romanian native speakers, students at the University of Bucharest who rated themselves as advanced and intermediate users of English, to use only one word to name the hybrids presented to them; as compounding is mainly used in Romanian to name hybrids, we expected it to be more often used. Surprisingly, 68.31% of the elicited Romanian words were lexical blends, likely due to the linguistic profile of our subjects, reinforcing Vasileanu & Niculescu-Gorpin’s (2022) corpus based-analysis that suggests that, due to the global English influence, the process is also active in Romanian. Most of the elicited Romanian lexical blends observe the patterns acknowledged in the literature, e.g. merging the beginning of the first source-word with the end of the second, preserving the phonological contour of a source-word, and source-word clipping at syllable boundaries. Nevertheless, a handful of items revealed morpho-phonological properties that had been previously considered impossible in blends (e.g. interfixes or switch points inside complex syllable constituents), evidence that some constraints, formulated mainly for English, need to be checked against larger datasets and against other languages as lexical blending is a very creative process that seems to transgress possible constraints.