Blends and Overlaps in Relational Morphology
Ray S. Jackendoff, Jenny Audring · 2023
The formalism of Relational Morphology (R. Jackendoff and J. Audring, The Texture of the Lexicon, Oxford University Press, 2020) offers a straightforward way to encode the lexical entry of a one-off blend such as spork, and to relate it to words it is built from, e.g. spoon and fork. The approach extends easily to cases of overlap, such as when Spanish and English are blended to form Spanglish. Blending with overlap occurs not just with these one-off items, but also with certain affixes, for instance -ery. Nouns such as mock-ery and nunn-ery simply concatenate the base and the affix. But if the base ends in -er, for instance in flatter, the derived form is not ✶flatterery but flattery. We argue that this haplology is not the result of a truncation process, but rather that the stretch -er- is an overlap of the base with the affix. We show that the formal principles that account for the form of one-off blends and overlaps are readily generalized to affixes such as -ery that can overlap with their bases. This generalization is expected in the Relational Morphology framework, but not in more traditional procedural approaches to these phenomena.