treated as two. The second dissimilarity is that some phonological materials in blends are deleted, while compounds are not.
However, the study of blending is not only limited to the area of morphology but also the area of phonology. The simple reason is that blends do
not merely combine two or more elements as in word-formation process. Rather, it has to be adjusted for the sake of pronunciation. Moreover, if the elements of
blends are separated, it is not only part or element of words but also the syllable and stress assignment are examined. It is obvious that blending also deals with
syllable constituents such as onset, nucleus, coda, or rhyme and also stress assignment which are known as prosodic properties Plag, 2003: 124. Therefore,
it is needed to treat blending as a prosodic morphology which discusses the interaction between morphology word-formation process and phonology
prosodic properties. This research used internet as the main source of data since new words
could be easily obtained via internet. Moreover, this research needed up-to-date data dealing with blends. Therefore, the data were collected from seven online
dictionaries and websites such as Oxford, Merriam-Webster, Collins Dictionary, Cambridge, Word Spy, Rice University Neologisms Database, and Urban
Dictionary. These online websites were always updated in publishing new words and reliable in providing a great deal of data.
The researcher was interested in analyzing blends because they offered complex linguistic aspects to investigate further. In other words, the structure of
blends needed morphological, semantic, and phonological analysis. Additionally, the relation between morphology and phonology was apparent in the study of
blends, so it was called a study of prosodic morphology. These analyses were all crucial in the formation of blends. Next, blends provided many variations of the
structure which was interesting to investigate further, such as variation of clipping and overlapping, variation of syllable constituents and stress assignment in blends.
This led to the deeper investigation to find out the nature of its variations. Another reason was that according to many researchers, blending was considered as
unproductive word-formation process compared to other word-formation process such as compounding and affixation. Therefore, the researcher was willing to put
much attention to this kind of word-formation process. Finally, this research attempts to uncover structures and patterns of blends
in both morphological and phonological analysis. Therefore, the target of prosodic morphology of English blends in this study is to investigate the interaction of
morphological structure and prosodic properties which are crucial for the formation of English blends.
B. Problem Formulation
In order to limit the discussion of English blending, four research problems have been formulated as follows.
1. What blending patterns are observed in English blends?
2. What word categories are English blends derived from?
3. What phonological characteristics of the elements are retained in English
blends? 4.
What patterns of meaning are observed in English blends?
C. Goals of the Study
The objective of this research is to answer four research problems formulated in the problem formulation. Therefore, there are four goals which are
going to achieve in this research. The first goal is to describe the combining patterns of English blends. This study uses the general combining patterns
proposed by Algeo 1977 as observed by Hong 2004: 122 and combining patterns based on splinters which are proposed by Lehrer 2007. These
combining patterns identify the combination of source words‟ elements which are retained to make a blend. Accordingly, there are two objectives to achieve the first
goal. The first objective is to identify which part of the source words that is combined to another word. The part of source words can be first part, final part, or
the whole part. The second objective is to classify them based on combining patterns of English blends.
The second goal is to identify the word category of each source word in the English blends. Two objectives are presented to accomplish the second goal. First
objective is to classify blends according to the word category of the source words, such as a noun + a noun, a verb + a verb, an adjective + an adjective, an adjective
+ a noun, a noun + a verb, and so forth. The second objective is to identify the nature of each category.
The third goal of this research is to examine the phonological characteristics of source words which influence the structure of resulting blends. The prosodic
property which can be observed in blends is the stress assignment. In order to achieve this fourth goal, two objectives are determined. The first objective is to
examine patterns of stress placement in English blends. The second objective is to identify the characteristics of stress placement of elements retained in the blends.
The fourth goal is to identify patterns of meaning in blends. The classification of meaning patterns are based on the logical relation between two or
more source words with the resulting blends. The objectives of this third goal are to classify English blends based on the meaning relation and to identify the nature
of each classification. To sum up, by finding the results, it is expected to treat a blend as a
complex linguistic unit which has a composite linguistic aspects, such as morphology, phonology, and semantic. As a final point, this study is going to
provide comprehensible set of blends as well as describe them as what they are.
D. Definition of Terms
These following terms are some terms used in this research. Each term is presented along with its definition in order to maintain the focus of this research.
The terms blending and blends are defined first since they are the center of this research. Szymanek 1989: 99 defines blending as a process of creation of
new word in which phonetic fragments of two or more words are joined together to create a single lexeme. Referring to the definition of blending, the definition of
blends is clear. Some researchers have the same idea of what blends are. Fromkin et al. 2000: 83, Finegan 2004: 55
and O‟Grady et al. 2005: 135 highlight that blends are words which are created from combining parts of two words.
Therefore, it is obvious that blending is the process of combining two words into one single word, while blends are the results of blending.
The term current English is defined in order to determine the range of time dealing with data collection. The word current
denotes “happening now; of the present time” Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 8
th
edition. Thus current English refers to English words which are used now in the present time.
Word category refers to linguistic category of words or classes of word. Radford et al. 2009: 129 classifies five major types of word classes, namely
nouns N, verbs V, adjectives A, adverbs Adv, and prepositions P. According to them, a noun is typically an abstract and concrete entity in the
world. A verb denotes to any action, activity, or state of being. An adjective is a property which a noun possesses. An adverb typically modifies a verb, adjective,
and another adverb indicating how, when, or why something happened or the degree to which a property characterizes an individual or event. Meanwhile, a
preposition relates objects, people, and events. Phonological characteristics in this research refer to the characteristics of
any phonological properties the blended elements have when they are combined with other blended elements. It includes the discussion of prosodic properties such
as syllable structure and stress assignment. The syllable structure deals with syllable constituents onset, nucleus, coda, and rhyme and syllable size the
number of syllable of the source words and resulting blends. The stress assignment has to do with stress placement of source words and resulting blends.
E. Benefits of the Study
This research, theoretically, may give a contribution to English Language Studies concerning the development of blending theory, especially for those
blends which occur in current English. In the advent of science and technology, there are more and more variations of blends which enter the English language. In
view of that, the investigation of new blends‟ formations is needed. This research deals with the combination of morphology and phonology analysis henceforth
prosodic morphology of English blends. Therefore, this research may contribute to the blending theory concerning types, structures, word categories, and prosodic
properties of blends in current English. Practically, this research will give contribution to English language teachers
and students who learn English blending. For English language teachers, this research provides numerous examples of blends and discussion on how to analyze
them. It would enrich their teaching repertoire in terms of assisting students in understanding the concept of blending. For English language students, this
research provides the basic knowledge of English blends. By providing more description of blends, types of blends, and how to separate blends, this research
helps English language students to explore the base words and find more examples of blends.
Generally, the finding of this research can enrich people knowledge related to linguistics study. It gives contribution to the analysis of blends by separating
them into elements. Hopefully, people are more aware of the blending phenomena so that they get the idea on how blends are structured.
