“With a million products out there, how do you advertise? You don’t. You oddvertise”.: A corpus-based study of some -vertise, -vertising, and -vertisement lexical blends in English

Abstract

The paper deals with certain formal and semantic aspects of 197 English lexical blends the right-hand elements of which are the splinters -vertise (← advertise), -vertising (← advertising), and -vertisement (← vertisement). It aims to give a detailed analysis of the formal as well as semantic behavior of the three splinters. The formal analysis of the data shows that all three splinters prefer to be combined with full left-hand elements, thus forming relatively transparent structures. The semantics of the analyzed blends indicates that the primary meanings of the source words advertise, advertising and advertisement, respectively, have remained unchanged, i.e. that the splinters -vertise, -vertising, and -vertisement simply represent abbreviated forms of their respective source words. Finally, the results of the analysis of the -vertise, -vertising, and -vertisement blends suggest quite strongly that, in the people’s constant battle for attention and profit, almost everything can be a billboard nowadays, from parts of the human body (e.g. legvertising), animals (e.g. sheepvertising) to roofs (e.g. roofvertisement), sky (e.g. skyvertisement) and even egg shells (e.g. egg-vertising).