LES MOTS-VALISES – AMBIGUÏTÉ OU QUASI-AMBIGUÏTÉ ?
PORTMANTEAU WORDS – AMBIGUITY OR QUASI-AMBIGUITY?

Summary/Abstract: First introduced with the help of the English writer Lewis Carroll in 1871, portmanteau words are a topical notion that seems to pose problems of comprehension. Portmanteau words are not the same as the acronym, a compound word and a word derived by truncation. Portmanteau words are based on a morphological process, resulting in semantic effects. In linguistics, we can also speak of haplology, a phonetic modification, in which phones or groups of phones that are identical or similar are deleted. The proposed study considers the degree of imprecision of the economic portmanteau words. In this case study, a series of portmanteau words from the economic field are analyzed. 20 students were interviewed, including 10 faculty students with an economic profile, 10 students in philology. The questionnaire included closed-ended questions with multiple response options, different contexts that helped or made it difficult to understand and choose an appropriate meaning. The subjects' responses were compared to emphasize the importance of getting closer to the meaning in case of misunderstanding of the terms, but also the degree of ambiguity of portmanteau words for both a specialized and a non-specialized target audience. Although we tend to consider that in the case of slips of the tongue and in the case of portmanteau words, there is ambiguity of meaning, the approximation is given by the contiguous existence of two radically different and ambivalent categories. So, we can talk about a quasi-ambiguity? In order to confirm or disprove the hypothesis, we will see the responses of the participants to the case study and their analysis.

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