Personal name (PN) blends (e.g., Merkozy from (Angela) Merkel and (Nicolas) Sarkozy) are often defined as creative ( Beliaeva 2022 ), yet the factors shaping their perceived creativity remain underexplored. This especially holds for aspects beyond the formal properties of PN blends and their name constituents. Adopting a usage-based approach ( Kemmer 2010 ), this study investigates how positive and negative connotative meanings and linguistic experience influence the perceived creativity of German PN blends. Connotative meanings were modeled using the name connotation profile ( Mehrabian 1997 ), modified with sentiment analysis and word embeddings. Perceived creativity was operationalized along two dimensions: originality and communicative success, i.e., the recoverability of name constituents and the understanding of connotative meanings. In a rating experiment, we tested two hypotheses: (H1) stronger connotative meanings increase perceived originality but decrease recoverability of blend constituents; (H2) greater linguistic experience decreases perceived originality but increases recoverability. Statistical analysis confirmed H1 only for originality, while no effect for H2 could be detected in our dataset. The study contributes to understanding of semantic creativity in name-based word-formation, highlights the role of connotative meanings in perceived creativity, and demonstrates how natural language processing methods can model the semantic properties of experimentally elicited PN blends.
Milena Belošević (Sun,) studied this question.