Abstract
This article focuses on how innovation and adoption, two commonly-cited processes of language change, can be discerned in the emergence and spread of lexical blends. Lexical blending is a productive process in English by which parts of two lexemes are combined in order to create a new lexeme. Brunch, which is formed through the combination of parts of breakfast and lunch, is a typical example. This article describes an experiment which investigated the ways in which speakers assign meaning to unfamiliar blends. Participants were presented with a number of unfamiliar blends, some attested and some invented, and asked to cite their source lexemes and meanings. A number of hypotheses were tested: (1) where a majority of speakers agree on the source lexemes of an unfamiliar blend, they will also agree on its meaning (2) the higher the number of syllables in an unfamiliar blend, the more likely it is a consensus will be achieved with regard to its source lexemes; (3) where the unfamiliar blend rhymes with one of its source lexemes, the more likely it is a consensus will be achieved with regard to its source lexemes. I conclude with an attempt to relate these findings to the speaker’s involvement in broader processes of language change.
