Blending: A brief history of misconception

Abstract

The article considers the main aspects of word-fusion, which is a means of word-building that has become popular in the last few decades. As a result, many scientific papers appeared whose authors are quite often not familiar with each other’s findings. That is why we aimed to highlight the major challenging aspects as well as little-known aspects of word-fusion and to present the main results obtained by researchers. We have shown that word-fusion has been in use at least since the 16th century, and not only in the English language. Now words derived according to the pattern are found in many languages of Continental Europe (German, French, Italian, etc.) and presumably existed in some languages, that are now extinct. There is a considerable number of literature on the subject that first appeared in the early 20th century, whereas in this country it happened half a century later. However, there were no less than ten theses, defended by Soviet and Russian linguists indicating a relatively high level of scrutiny. Nowadays, practically everyone recognizes the fact, that word-fusion is a separate productive word-building means used not only for word-play but also for term-building, and nomination of new objects and phenomena, mostly hybrid ones. As far as there is still no universally accepted term for the word-formation means in question, we propose “blending” which is mostly used by foreign and many Russian scholars, or “word-fusion” which is brief and semantically transparent.