POSITIONING SOURCE WORDS IN TWO-MEMBER SERBIAN LEXICAL BLENDS: AN ANALYSIS OF SOURCE WORDS’ SYLLABLE NUMBER AND FREQUENCY
POSITIONING SOURCE WORDS IN TWO-MEMBER SERBIAN LEXICAL BLENDS: AN ANALYSIS OF SOURCE WORDS’ SYLLABLE NUMBER AND FREQUENCY

Summary/Abstract: Starting from the research results for intentional English blends which demonstrate that their first source word tends to have fewer syllables (Kelly, 1998; Renner, 2014 for coordinate blends; Gries, 2004b; 2004c; 2012 for (non-)coordinate blends) as well as greater frequency than their second source word (Kelly, 1998 for coordinate blends; Gries, 2004c; 2012 for (non-)coordinate blends), this paper aims to investigate whether the factors of syllable number and word frequency influence the positions of two source words in intentional paradigmatic and non-paradigmatic Serbian blends. To this end, a sample of 358 (non-)paradigmatic blends was drawn from the existing collections of blends in Serbian. The results of the statistical analysis show that the positioning of two source words in both paradigmatic and non-paradigmatic blends is significantly influenced by the source words’ number of syllables, but not their frequency.

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