Oftenly

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Aug 23, 2007, at 8:00 AM, Larry Horn wrote:

> At 3:34 PM -0500 8/22/07, Cohen, Gerald Leonard wrote:
>> For some other reason? Yes, try blending: "often" + "frequently."
>
> My problem with the diagnosis of blending...

we went around this topic at length last august, in a thread on "tad
bit", when i wrote (8/15/06):

  >i think that jerry's use of "blend" here stretches the word beyond
all usefulness.  it's just wrong to use a single term for all
expressions that can be analyzed as a combination of two expressions.<

the issue is both conceptual and terminological.  the conceptual
issue is whether there is anything that unites all sorts of "combos",
all sorts of expressions that can be viewed as combinations of two
expressions -- at least the following:

1. portmanteaus: intentional inventions like "smog"
2. inadvertent speech errors in which specific expressions are
combined as a result of competition between them in production
3. "piling on", or "reinforcement": combination of expressions to get
the effect of both ("small little", "return back")
4. ordinary combinations of constructions (a progressive passive, for
example)
5. extensions of constructions, idioms, or morphological patterns to
new items (using "donate" in the double-object construction)
6. anacoluthon: shifting from one construction to another through
losing track in production planning

(instances of several of these types can spread, in which case they
are combos only historically.)

i see no unity here.  in fact, it seems to me that there are several
quite different psychological mechanisms at work here, and i'd prefer
to distinguish the cases until some underlying unity can be
demonstrated.

jerry cohen seems to believe that most, if not all, of these types of
combos are instances of a single phenomenon, and he labels these
"blends".

as i've explained many times in the past, i use the term "blends" for
type 2 exclusively  (sometimes saying "inadvertent blends" to clearly
distinguish type 2 from type 1); this usage is widespread in
psycholinguistics, and i believe it's larry horn's.  when the term is
used this way, it conveys a claim about the psychological mechanism
involved in particular occurrences.  when "blend" is used to cover
many or all of the combo types, it conveys no such claim.

larry was treating jerry's assertion that "oftenly" is a blend as an
assertion that it is a type 2 combo, and was disputing that,
maintaining instead (as i would too) that it's probably a type 5
combo.  if jerry was merely asserting that "oftenly" is *some* type
of combo, then there's nothing to discuss, because this assertion
makes no claim about the psychological mechanism involved.

arnold

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org