‘Brexit, Grexit, with the possibility of Spexit’: Blend splinters and secreted affixes as creative word-formation mechanisms

The emergence of new splinters, such as -tainment or -tarian, is becoming a pervasive phenomenon in English word-formation. They are originally non-morphemic portions of words that are split off and used in the creation of new words, through a blending process. However, some of them can acquire a specific new meaning and be recurrently used on new bases, thus becoming more productive bound morphemes, either combining forms or secreted affixes. This study investigates splinters and their evolution from creative blend elements to more regular affix-like forms undergoing a secretion process. It shows that the birth of splinters and the coinage of new words containing them is a paradigmatic process, based on formal and semantic similarity to well-known existing words. In particular, the study focuses on an emerging case of splinter – i.e. -exit – earliest found in Grexit and Brexit, and recently in analogical formations that constitute a series. Using a corpus-based approach, the study demonstrates that series represent the shift from creative local mechanisms of surface analogy to more extended phenomena of analogy via schema. Therefore, a schema can be viewed as the first step towards the development of productive grammatical rules.