Blend formation tendencies, from English to Arabic : a comparative study

Abstract

Blending in English is a widely recognized means for forming new lexemes by joining two or more existing words in a way where at least one of them is shortened (Algeo 1991: 10). Familiar examples are brunch from breakfast and lunch, slanguage from slang and language, and chortle from chuckle and snort (Algeo 1977: 49). Linguistic studies of English blends – which are numerous – have focused in particular on the three following features of blends: the cut-off point in the source words, the proportional contributions from the source words to the blend, and the stress pattern of the blend. The main aim of the present research is to examine Arabic blends in the light of the blend formation tendencies that have been identified with respect to these features in English. Blends in Classical Arabic are generally formed by joining the first two root consonants of each source word and imposing the prosodic pattern CaCCaC on them. Typical examples of Classical Arabic blends are /ʕabdar(ij)/ 'someone from the family of Abdul Dār' < /ʕabd/ 'slave' and /da:r/ 'house', /ʕabqas(ij)/ 'someone from the family of Abdul Qays' < /ʕabd/ 'slave' and /qajs/ 'a male name', and /ʕabʃam(ij)/ 'someone from the family of Abdi Shams' < /ʕabd/ 'slave' and /ʃams/ 'sun'– all names for Arab tribes in the 6th Century AD. However, such Classical blends are few in number. The more numerous blends that have been formed in Arabic in recent times do not appear to follow this root-and-pattern template. Examples are /fawsʕawt(ij)/ 'supersonic' < /fawq/ 'above' and /sʕawt(ij)/ 'sound', and /qabħarb/ 'pre-war' < /qabl/ 'before' and /ħarb/ 'war'. Since no linguistic study has investigated in depth the structure of modern Arabic blends, the main aim of this thesis is to uncover the regularities that are found in these modern formations and in that way contribute to understanding the structure of Arabic words in general and blends in particular. The main research question in this study is: To what extent do the blend formation tendencies identified in English apply to blend formation in Arabic? The data for Arabic come from published resources as well as a survey and an experiment, both designed to collect some novel blends by asking native speakers of Arabic to form blends from a list of word pairs. These data were examined in light of the main features and tendencies related to blend-formation in English. The overall result of the investigation is that there is a high degree of resemblance between modern Arabic blends and English blends. This is the case for both the established Modern Arabic blends and the novel invented blends. In this respect, they differ notably from the established blends of Classical Arabic. The main tendencies for forming Arabic blends that have been identified in this study are: (1) There is a general tendency for the cut-off points in source words to occur at syllabic joints with the greatest preference for them to occur between syllabic constituents. (2) There is a general tendency for the greater proportional contribution to come from the shorter source word, and for source words of equal phonemic lengths to contribute equal proportions to the blend. (3) There is a general tendency for the stress pattern of the blend to be identical to that of the source word that has identical syllabic size as that of the blend.