Formal, semantic and pragmatic motivations for blending in English

Blending is a linguistic phenomenon which has recently attracted the attention of several scholars. Morphologists have currently shown that, despite their diversity, lexical blends display regularities in prosodic structure and meaning. However, despite the recent interest in blending, this is still a somehow poorly understood and under-researched mechanism, often regarded as irregular or marginal, with fuzzy boundaries and posing problems of categorisation. This paper reassesses the importance of blending as a word-formation mechanism used to create neologisms in English. It explores a collection of 245 modern English blends with the aims to: 1) identify the formal, semantic and pragmatic motivations which govern their creation, 2) distinguish blends from regular and clipped compounds, and 3) show that they deserve a locus in productive morphology on account of their regularity and productivity in English, especially in terms of profitability in the formation of neologisms.