Headedness in contemporary English slang blends

Abstract

The present paper aims at investigating both morphosyntactic and semantic headedness of 60 (61 senses) contemporary English slang blends, as well as some of the blends’ formal properties, namely the patterns by which they are formed and the syntactic categories they and their input words belong to. The blends whose first use was recorded between 2000 and 2019 are excerpted from the online version of Green’s Dictionary of Slang. The reason why slanguage is chosen for blend excerption is the fact that slangy formations are conscious rather than spontaneous [Mattiello 2008: 16], the same way that blends are, and also because slang, like blending, has a tendency for clipping words [Mattiello 2008: 141]. Among 9 formation patterns identified, half of the blends are formed from two shortened rather than whole words, which results in their greater morphotactic opacity. A qualitative and quantitative analysis of morphosyntactic headedness of the slang blends shows that in most cases it is the right-hand member that functions as the head. On the other hand, a qualitative and quantitative analysis of semantic headedness shows that the preference of the slang blends for the semantic right-headedness is not that prominent, since only 21 out of 61 examples can be said to be semantically right-headed, which may in part be explained by the cryptic character of the slang register. Also, only 15 out of 32 endocentric slang blends appear to have the longer of the two words as the semantic head. Finally, although the slang blends analyzed here are for the most part no more than the semantic alternatives to the existing standard words and phrases, they nonetheless increase the potential of a language, as well as the area of word-formation research [Mattiello 2005: 18].