Blending, crossing or lexical fusion in Portuguese: structural patterns and (dis)similitude regarding composition

Abstract

This paper examines the patterns of blending in Portuguese, based on empirical data from Portuguese from Brazil, Mozambique and Portugal. A parallelism with the composition process is drawn and: (i) the dissimilarities between both processes – particularly those related to the nature of the source units and the non-concatenative character of the merging – as well as (ii) the similarities regarding the patterns of the internal organization of the lexical units and the classes of categorical relations between the input units are analyzed.