REVISITING THE STRUCTURE OF LEXICAL BLENDS FROM SLIPS OF TONGUE (BL)

Abstract

This paper examines lexical blends originated from slips of tongue (BLs), which result from unintentional speech deviations due to linguistic processing failures. Based on a dataset formed by 48 BLs, our analysis follows morphophonological criteria such as (i) involved bases; (ii) target and resulting syllabic structures; (iii) internal constituents of the syllable (onset and rhyme (nucleus and coda)); and (iv) metrical foot. We use the Prosodic Hierarchy (Ito and Mester, 2009) to analyse the prosodic structure of utterances, focusing on the syllable and the metrical foot as relevant loci for the blending process (XXXXX and Gonçalves, 2023). The results indicate that BLs are formed by the same forces that create phonological and morphological neological blends (BNs), highlighting the sharing of syllabic status between bases and the scansion of metrical feet. Furthermore, BLs show that segmental similarity is not only a pragmatic success factor, as pointed out by XXXXX and Gonçalves (2023), but also a relevant factor for unintentional blend formation contexts. In the case of BLs, segmental similarity seems to be even more crucial than in neological blends.

KEYWORDS: blends; slips of tongue; morphophonology