“WITH A MILLION PRODUCTS OUT THERE, HOW DO YOU ADVERTISE? YOU DON’T. YOU ODDVERT ISE.”: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF SOME -VERT ISE, -VERT ISING, AND -VERT ISEMENT LEXICAL BLENDS IN ENGLISH
Keywords:
word-formation, English lexical blends, splinters -vertise, -vertising, -vertisementAbstract
The paper deals with certain formal and semantic aspects of 197 English lexical blends
the right-hand elements of which are the splinters -vertise (← advertise), -vertising (← advertising),
and -vertisement (← vertisement). It aims to give a detailed analysis of the formal as well
as semantic behavior of the three splinters. The formal analysis of the data shows that all three
splinters prefer to be combined with full left-hand elements, thus forming relatively transparent
structures. The semantics of the analyzed blends indicates that the primary meanings of the
source words advertise, advertising and advertisement, respectively, have remained unchanged,
i.e. that the splinters -vertise, -vertising, and -vertisement simply represent abbreviated forms of
their respective source words. Finally, the results of the analysis of the -vertise, -vertising, and
-vertisement blends suggest quite strongly that, in the people’s constant battle for attention and
profit, almost everything can be a billboard nowadays, from parts of the human body (e.g. legvertising),
animals (e.g. sheepvertising) to roofs (e.g. roofvertisement), sky (e.g. skyvertisement) and
even egg shells (e.g. egg-vertising).
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