Quantitative corpus data on blend formation: psycho- and cognitive-linguistic perspectives

On the basis of a heuristic characterization of intentional blending as a tripartite word-formation process, this paper discusses a variety of case studies concerned with the effects of similarity and recognizability on the formation of blends. More specifically, the case studies focus on (i) the degree of similarity between the two source words that are blended (on different levels of linguistic analysis), (ii) the ordering of source words in blends, and (iii) the ways in which source words are split up and merged into blends. The case studies include comparisons to supposedly related phenomena, viz. speech-error blends and complex clipping, and extend previous work by proposing new, or improving existing, corpus-linguistic operationalizations of relevant concepts and increasing the sample sizes from previous studies.