Word-building Potential of Telescoped Words

Abstract

This article discusses some of the issues of telescopic word formation, also known as blending or lexical amalgamation. In the last decades, their number in the English language has been steadily increasing and, to a lesser extent, this process is observed in other European languages, including Russian. The main reasons for this are linguistic economy and word creation, including through a language game. Having summarized the points of view of different authors, we were able to give a definition of blending – this is the coinage of two or more source words, at least one of which is clipped, or their overlapping within one derived lexical unit, and indicate the differences between blending and other types of curtailed words – clippings and abbreviations, as well as from compounding. Blending is a non-morphological way of word formation: blends are formed by means of fusion of incomplete morphs that are not independent lexemes. Fragments of words participating in the process of word fusion are irregular and regular, the latter tend to transform a quasimorpheme into an affixoid. We have considered groups of examples, which include suffix-like elements -burger, -rama, -scape, -tel, -teria, -torium, - (a) thon, -tron, -topia, -mobile, -versity, - cade, -mania / -maniac, -xit, - (a) geddon, -elfie, -licious, - (a) holic, -onomics, -gate, some of which are also productive in Russian. We also determined that blends can serve as the basis for the formation of other blends, and also contain foreign language components borrowed, in the case of English, from the Romance languages.