Novel Words with Final Combining Forms in English. A Case for Blends in Word Formation

Morphological theories that assume all word formation to consist in concatenation of morphemes run into difficulties stating the defining properties of the notion of final combining forms that can be used as constituents of novel words. The novel words under consideration are of two types: (a) nouns ending in forms like -ology, -ography, -ometer, -crat, -naut, -phile; (b) nouns ending in forms like -(a)holic, -(a)thon. Forms of type (b) are only roughly identifiable due to their indeterminable size of segmental material. In this paper the notion of final combining form is called into question and ultimately rejected on the grounds that words allegedly built with final combining forms of type (b), when analysed within the theory of universal, ranked and violable constraints in its OO Correspondence version, conform to the defining properties of blends.