Lexis: Journal in English Lexicology (Dec 2019)
Gold Punning: studying multistable meaning structures using a systematically collected set of lexical blends
Abstract
The multifaceted and intermediary nature of lexical blending has been discussed from various theoretical perspectives in the last decades [Kubozono 1990; Kelly 1998; Dressler 2000; Kemmer 2003; Gries 2006; Fandrych 2008]. Corpus linguistic studies have contributed to a growing body of empirical data demonstrating significant patterns of blend formation [e.g. Gries 2004b, 2006; Beliaeva 2014]. These more recent findings are particularly important as they illustrate that lexical blending is not as irregular and unsystematic as it has often been assumed in the past [Lehrer 1996; Kelly 1998; Kemmer 2003; López Rúa 2004; Beliaeva 2014]. Because blends are often short-lived [Cannon 1986; Lehrer 1996] and informal [Bauer 1983; López Rúa 2010; Bauer 2012], making predictions about their nature is a complex task. Systematic analysis involves therefore a number of challenges. One such challenge is how to detect and collect these unspecified and un-tagged lexical items in a corpus. It is a well-known fact that conventional dictionaries are poor sources [Cannon 1986], and alternative methodologies are therefore required. Another challenge is how to ensure that the collected data is representative of all lexical blends within a selected set of limitations. Besides addressing these challenges, semantic aspects of ambiguity were investigated from a Cognitive Linguistics (CL) perspective [Geeraerts 2006a]. The patterns of ambiguity in the data are explained as instantiations of multistable perception, which is understood as a phenomenon in which “our perceptual system fails to produce a stable unambiguous percept” [Kornmeier et al. 2009: 138]. From a linguistic perspective, this means that aspects such as phonology, orthography, and semantics constitute variables holding a potential for functionally employed lexical ambiguity [Renner 2015]. At various stages, the study employed both automated processes and manual analyses, which means that workload limitations applied to the scope of the data. A central aim of the study was, however, to develop systematic approaches to the collection of lexical blends, precisely because it is considered necessary in the development of blend research in general.
