Head Faithfulness in Lexical Blends: a Positional Approach to Blend Formation

KATHERINE SHAW: Head Faithfulness in Lexical Blends: A Positional Approach to Blend Formation (Under the direction of Elliott Moreton) This thesis applies Positional Faithfulness theory (Beckman 1998) to the problem of lexical blending in English. Lexical blends, like brunch or motel, contract multiple source words into a single lexical item shaped by competing sets of phonological and psycholinguistic constraints. Existing studies of blend structure (e.g., Bat-El & Cohen 2012, Gries 2004a,b) focus on the contributions of each source word relative to their linear order, positions that have little relevance outside of blend formation. I present both corpus and experimental data to argue that previously observed right-word faithfulness effects are actually due to head faithfulness (Revithiadou 1999). This has two major implications: it provides evidence for the existence of positional faithfulness and of head faithfulness in particular; second, it demonstrates that blend formation is subject to independently motivated, broadly applicable constraints. In addition, the discovery of leftheaded blends in the corpus argues that blending is a distinct process from compounding.