To “brunch” or to “brench”: some aspects of blend structure

Three studies demonstrate that aspects of English blend structures like brunch are quite predictable from cognitive and linguistic principles. The first study analyzed the order in which words are represented in blends and found that three variables that predict word order in conjunctive phrases like smoke and fog also predict the order in which word components appear in blends like smog. In particular, the first word represented in blends tends to be higher in frequency, contain fewer syllables, and denote more prototypical category members than the second word. The second study examined the boundaries between blend components and found that they fall primarily at major phonological joints, such as syllable, onset, and rime boundaries. Breaks at onset-rime boundaries were more than four times more common than breaks at body-coda boundaries, thus supporting an onset-rime representation of English syllable structure. The third study showed that the phonemes involved at the juncture between blend components tend to be phonologically similar, which might be used to emphasize the teasing nature of blends. More generally, the studies illustrate the promise of taking hypothesis-testing approaches to blend structure rather than the taxonomic approaches common in prior investigations