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9 - Is Play on Words Fair Play or Dirty Play?

On Ill-Meaning Use of Morphological Blending

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2022

By
Natalia Beliaeva
Edited by
Natalia Knoblock
Natalia Knoblock
Affiliation:
Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan
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Summary

Lexical blends such as Brexit < Britain + exit have been referred to in literature as instances of word play. The playful character of blends underlie their use in such domains as slang, advertising and political media. As has been shown, blending a personal name with a common noun, e.g. Haputin < hapat’ (grab) + Putin goes along with a variety of derogatory language means. Building on the findings in Beliaeva and Knoblock (2020), this study investigates factors that may trigger the use of lexical blending as verbal aggression and aims to explore derogatory meanings of blends referring to people. It is hypothesized that blending a personal name with another word enhances the likelihood of inducing derogatory meaning. Sample texts containing blends are extracted from the Now corpus and the iWeb corpus and analysed for the presence of emotionally coloured lexical elements. The results of the study suggest that the context of blends differs from the context of their non-blended counterparts, and reveal specific features in the use of blended words with human referents.

Keywords

lexical blendspersonal namesword formationneologismscorpus data
Type
Chapter
Information
The Grammar of Hate
Morphosyntactic Features of Hateful, Aggressive, and Dehumanizing Discourse
 , pp. 177 - 196
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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