BLENDED WORDS WITH PROPER-NAME COMPONENTS TO EXPRESS QUALITY IN PRESENT-DAY AMERICAN SPORTS DISCOURSE

The article deals with compounding in present-day English. A specific type of compound words, blended words, used in modern American sports media discourse was studied. Specifically, blended words of adjectival nature were analyzed in the paper. The author analyzes blended words created by means of joining contracted forms of a proper name and an adjective or participle II. This type of blended words in American sports media discourse is suggested to be specific to sports terminology only; however, the trend in this type of word formation penetrates other spheres of human activity. The component represented by a proper name always refers to an athlete’s or team name. The major function of such lexemes is to describe a game or recent period of the athlete or team by means of stylistic effect. Pun is the basic device used in formation of such blended words. It has been established that the researched lexical units can be divided into two major groups: blended words with adjectives and blended words with participle II. A slight semantic difference between the groups has been revealed. It has also been indicated that such blended words are primarily used as headlines to articles posted on Internet pages to describe a recent match or successful/unsuccessful period for a team. Broader sentences are used in contaminated form to create certain stylistic affect and attract reader’s attention to the article. Specific examples slightly deviating from the entire group of lexemes have been analyzed, namely blended words used in a speech of a sports commentator and blended words having slightly different morphological structure. The research contributes greatly to the theory of word formation, namely compounding. Further prospects of the research have been singled out.