BLEND-O-RAMA: BLENDING IN THE TITLES OF EPISODES OF ANIMATED TELEVISION SERIES FOR CHILDREN

Abstract

Often defined as a marginal word-formation process whose governing principles remain a matter of controversy, lexical blending has been examined from various perspectives over the past fifty years or so. Lexical blends have thus been described as (mostly) ephemeral linguistic creations, playful and witty, that are likely to occur in popular press, advertising, and product naming (Bryant 1974; Lieber 2010). Although we can nowadays understand the key characteristics of blends, in terms of their semantic, phonological and orthographic features, corpus-based studies of blends associated with particular types of discourse remain scarce. Television discourse is no exception. It has been cited as a rich source of blends (Mattiello 2013; Sams 2016), yet few have hitherto conducted their detailed analysis (cf. Andriani, Moehkardi 2019). Having noticed that blends frequently occur in the titles of episodes of animated television shows for children (e.g. Smeldorado in Inspector Gadget, The Three Smurfketeers in The Smurfs, Pinknic in The Pink Panther), we decided to investigate their structural characteristics. For this purpose, we collected a corpus of approximately 420 blends from the titles of animated series episodes, spanning 1950-2020. The analysis has shown that haplology and hyphenation feature prominently in the collected blends, as well as that several splinters are repeatedly used in their formation.