RRL, LXVII, 4, p. 363–376, Bucureşti, 2022 LEXICAL BLENDING IN PRESENT-DAY ROMANIAN: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY * MONICA VASILEANU, ANABELLA-GLORIA NICULESCU-GORPIN 1 Abstract: Lexical blending has been a puzzle for linguists, especially because word formation processes are somehow predictable, whereas lexical blending is not. Romanian lexical blending has been barely discussed in the literature, just a few articles citing a small number of ephemeral creations (see below) based on scarce data, and having little theoretical implications. Our study is the first to present a fully- fledged corpus-based analysis of nonce and wider-accepted Romanian lexical blends, exploring the etymological, structural, phonological, semantic and stylistic patterns of present-day Romanian lexical blends, thus offering some insights into how these unusual lexical items are formed and used by Romanian native speakers. Keywords: lexical blending, nonce words, borrowing, language contact, word formation. 1. INTRODUCTION New words are born every day in all languages, be it through internal or external processes. Lexical blending is somehow the Cinderella of the former, as it is pretty much unpredictable and, even if linguists have tried to define and theorise it, the outcome has not been one single-theoretical framework, but many; some share common aspects, while others are fundamentally divergent (see Section 2 below). Lexical blending has been discussed mainly in connection with English, but other languages have also been considered (French, Italian, Polish etc.); little has been said about Romanian (see Section 2). As empirical observations have shown us that lexical blending seems to be pretty productive in present-day Romanian, especially in journalese, we have decided to look at Romanian lexical blending synchronically, starting from a corpus of present-day Romanian. Sections 3 discusses our corpus-based analysis, and in Section 4 we draw some conclusions. * This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research, CNCS - UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2019-0894, within PNCDI III. 1 “Iorgu Iordan – Alexandru Rosetti” Institute of Linguistics/University of Bucharest, monica.vasileanu@litere.unibuc.ro, anabellaniculescu@hotmail.com.