New Blends in the English Language

Sammanfattning: Titel: New Blends in the English Language Författare: Anna Enarsson Antal sidor: 29 Abstract: The aim of this essay was to identify new blends that have entered the English language. Firstly six different word-formation processes, including blending, was described. Those were compounding, clipping, backformation, acronyming, derivation and blending. The investigation was done by using a list of blends from Wikipedia. The words were looked up in the Longman dictionary of 2005 and in a dictionary online. A google search and a corpus investigation were also conducted. The investigation suggested that most of the blends were made by clipping and the second most common form was clipping and overlapping. Blends with only overlapping was unusual and accounted for only three percent. The investigation also suggested that the most common way to create blends by clipping was to use the first part of the first word and the last part of the second word. The blends were not only investigated according to their structure but also according to the domains they occur in. This part of the investigation suggested that the blends were most frequent in the technical domain, but also in the domain of society