Lexical Blends in Greek and Latin Comedic Idiom

Abstract

This dissertation collects two dozen lexical blends attested in Greek and Latin comedic literature, analyzing and discussing not only their formations and semantics but also their pragmatic functions, which entail both socio-linguistic and literary perspectives such as how the use of blends reflects on the social context and how it helps to construct an artistic or literary dynamic. A lexical blend is a kind of word formation in which (typically) two separate source-words are melded into a new word form, which usually exhibits phonetic overlapping and combines the meaning of both source-words (e.g. English chortle which blends chuckle and snort). Despite the occurrence of lexical blends in Greek and Latin, their existence has not been generally acknowledged or even recognized. Traditional analyses of word formation in Greek and Latin focus on two processes: derivation and compounding, which are regular, systematic, and widely productive in both languages. Yet there are words in Greek and Latin whose formations cannot be well explained through derivation or compounding in part because they contain non-morphemic constituents: derivation and compounding operate on morphemic constituents such as lexical roots, stem-formants, prefixes, and affixes. Some of the unaccounted-for formations, however, can be explained as blends. Because blending regularly clips source-words at points of phonetic overlap rather than at morphemic boundaries, a resulting blend will consist of non-morphemic elements (e.g. English chortle looks like a derivative of *chort but no such lexical base exists). The recognition of lexical blends as such in Greek and Latin thus supplements the traditional analyses of word formation in Greek and Latin, offers clear and economical explanations of the formations and semantics of hitherto troublesome words, provides solutions to several vexing textual problems, illuminates what is going on in the passages in which lexical blends occur, and adds more generally to the literature on the history and use lexical blends.