近年，英語語彙に blend （混成語）が激増している事実については，すでに hellog でも繰り返し取り上げてきた．
・ 「#631. blending の拡大」 ([2011-01-18-1])
・ 「#876. 現代英語におけるかばん語の生産性は本当に高いか？」 ([2011-09-20-1])
・ 「#4369. Brexit --- 現代の病理と遊びの語形成」 ([2021-04-13-1])
一見すると blend は人目を引く言葉遊びにすぎず，形態論上あくまで周辺的な現象にとどまると思われるかもしれない．しかし，近年の英語語形成におけるその生産性の高さは，従来の見方を変えつつある．例えば，Fertig (70) は，混成という語形成が理論的な意義をもつことを次のように力説している．
Blends are often treated as a marginal phenomenon (Haspelmath and Sims 2010:40). Aronoff discusses them under the heading 'oddities' and considers them 'words which have no recognizable internal structure or constituents'; they are 'opaque, and hence uncommon' (1976: 20). Recent developments suggest that Aronoff may have had the relationship between opacity and frequency backwards here. Blends may have been rather opaque in 1976 precisely because they were still relatively uncommon. Today, at least in English, blends (of certain types) can hardly be called uncommon, and we generally seem to have little trouble parsing and processing them. As we will see in §7.3.8, this issue of the relationship between the frequency of a morphological pattern and its transparency/opacity has implications for some fundamental theoretical issues of great relevance to morphological change.
To the extent that some types of blending have become productive and predictable morphological operations in present-day English, it is no longer accurate to classify them as non-proportional. They amount to a kind of compounding with the two elements overlapping in accordance with well defined constraints. Within Paul's proportional theory, they could thus be handled by an extension of the (syntagmatic) proportional equations that he proposes for syntax (see §6.2 below). Blending as a type of word formation would fit even more easily into certain other theories of morphology. Insights and analytical tools from Prosodic Morphology (McCarthy and Prince 1995) have made it clear that (most) blends absolutely do have 'recognizable internal structure'. They are a type of non-concatenative morphology. Instead of combining two words into a linear string as in compounding, blends superimpose one word onto the prosodic structure of another (Piñeros 1998, 2004).
従来，混成語は形態論的には内部構造が不透明とみなされてきた．しかし，それは混成による語形成の生産性がまだ低かったために十分に解明されておらず，「不透明」とのレッテルを貼られてきただけなのではないか．混成語が横溢している現在，使用者もすっかり慣れ，むしろ透明性が高くなってきたといえるのではないか．そして，遅ればせながら，形態理論や音韻理論による解明のメスが入り始めたのではないか，とそのような議論である．
韻律形態論 (Prosodic Morphology) という分野が提唱されているようであり，さらに「#3722. 混成語は右側主要部の音節数と一致する」 ([2019-07-06-1]) でみた通り，混成語に特徴的な韻律上の制限も確かにあるようだ．今後の混成語言語学の展開に期待したい．
・ Fertig, David. Analogy and Morphological Change. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013.
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