Resumen de The creativity of the Catalan language analyzed through the blending process
Immaculada Fàbregas Alegret, David Ar Rouz
If the capacity to coin new words is an indicator of a language's vitality, new words obtained from the virtual press of recent years should give us an idea of how alive the Catalan language is. The present study focuses on a specific neological means of shortening, namely blending, understood as a combination of word segments that come to form a syntagmatic structure. This kind of process, like initialization or abbreviation, is especially spontaneous. This means that blends do not obey morphological rules but appear according to criteria that are basically phonetic. The objective of the study is to present the latest tendencies in the occurrence of blend neologisms. The examples will be from the Catalan virtual press since these informal texts are likely to provide different kinds of neologisms, and blends in particular. Based on the database of the Observatori de Neologia set up by the Institute for Applied Linguistics (Pompeu Fabra University), the article will present the productivity of this neological recourse in the Catalan virtual press of distinct geographical areas between 2008 and 2010. The data will be subjected to a quantitative, dialectal, morphologic, semantic, syntactic and phonetic analysis and a contrastive analysis in relation with other neological shortening recourses.
