Les amalgames français et allemands Une explication structurale des différences

In this article, blending is considered as a deliberate extra-grammatical morphological operation in the sense of Natural Morphology. This implies that blending is rooted in universal cognitive capacities, on the one hand, and in the grammatical competence that speakers of a particular language have, on the other. Two corpora of French and German blends are analysed on the basis of a typology taking into account the extragrammatical nature of blending. In fact, the similarities between the blends of the two languages, revealed by the contrastive analysis, can be attributed to universal cognitive factors such as the preference for an iconic relation between the conceptual and the morphological structure of words, whereas the differences may be explained on account of well-known structural differences between French and German in the domains of prosody and morphology.