The structure and semantics of contemporary English blends

This article presents an approach to the resolution of a much discussed problem of morphological classification of blend words and their distinction from the neighbouring morphological categories such as clipping compounds. The research takes a data-driven approach to study the interaction between the form and the meaning of blends and clipping compounds in a corpus of English neologisms. An analysis of semantic properties of these words is undertaken, as a result of which the formation of blends and clipping compounds is explained in terms of two different models.