The Difference between Blends and Clipped Compounds

This paper wants to refute the traditional claim that blends or portmanteau words are unsystematic. First, it will be shown that one must distinguish between two types of concatenations of portions of two words. One the hand formations that combine the first portions of the two source words and on the other words in which the first part of the first source word is combined with the final part of the second. These last group are real blends. The first one is better called clipped compounds, complex clippings or stub compounds. Both groups show a righthand head. Clipped compounds appear to be a subcategory of compounds and follow the Compound Stress Rule. In blends the right part of the final form is also the head. However, blends copy the prosodic and syllabic structure of the second source word. Whereas compounds consist of at least two prosodic or phonological words, blends consist of only one. This leads to the conclusion that blends can best be described as an intermediate category between compounds and simplex words.