PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The blend type we call ‘personal name blends’ (PN blends for short) in this paper refers to word-formation structures whose clipped constituents are personal names. Unlike related structures such as lexical blends or coordinative compounds, PN blends are under-researched, in particular with respect to their meaning. In this paper, we show - pace claims in the literature - that English and German PN blends are not a marginal word-formation pattern, that their semantics is underspecified but by no means unsystematic, and that they are in fact similar to certain, putatively better understood coordinative compounds. These findings have implications for how we understand blending within a wider perspective of word-formation systems, both within and across languages. More specifically, we provide a semantic typology of English and German PN blends and formalize its major types. Besides a smaller main group of determinative PN blends, we argue that the majority of these formations are polysemous, but include as a central meaning component a form of ascribed social status (such as a rivalry, a friendship, or being a couple). Making use of Barsalou frames and a Searlian social ontology, we model these social statuses as central frame nodes that are connected via attribute-value chains to the, ontologically more basic, personal names that serve as constituents in PN blends