NYT Goofup is a syntactic blend

[Benjamin Fortson]

>      Syntactic blends are of interest for producing ellipsis,
> redundancy, grammatical change, and semantic change. They are
> relevant for possibly challenging the Law of Least Effort, the view
> that language is a code, the supposed rigorousness of distributional
> rules, the view that language has structure.

How is it that blends challenge the view that language has structure...?

> "again and again" blended to "time and again;" then "time and again"
> apparently blended with "time after time" to produce "time and time
> again." How would generative grammar handle this latter construction?

Presumably the same way (at some level) that it handles the creation of
lexical blends, which is more or less what is going on here too. If the
generative component goofs by mixing and matching two things that aren't
"supposed" to be mixed and matched, that is not evidence that generative
theory is incorrect. That is a performance error.

>      "Structure," "system" imply something static. Processes in
> language (e.g. blending) put the focus on something dynamic. Blends
> are a part of the dynamic synchrony of language, i.e.,in the here and
> now language is dynamic.

Seems to me that the GENERATIVE property of generative grammar is pretty
dynamic, wouldn't you say...? The "static" rules are used to produce
stuff, after all.

Ben