Lexical blends such as Brexit < Britain + exit have been referred to in literature as instances of word play. The playful character of blends underlie their use in such domains as slang, advertising and political media. As has been shown, blending a personal name with a common noun, e.g. Haputin < hapat’ (grab) + Putin goes along with a variety of derogatory language means. Building on the findings in Beliaeva and Knoblock (2020), this study investigates factors that may trigger the use of lexical blending as verbal aggression and aims to explore derogatory meanings of blends referring to people. It is hypothesized that blending a personal name with another word enhances the likelihood of inducing derogatory meaning. Sample texts containing blends are extracted from the Now corpus and the iWeb corpus and analysed for the presence of emotionally coloured lexical elements. The results of the study suggest that the context of blends differs from the context of their non-blended counterparts, and reveal specific features in the use of blended words with human referents.

The study highlights semantic, syntactic, and functional features of two novel slurs that have recently entered the Russian and Ukrainian languages as a result of the Ukrainian crisis. The words ukrop (dill) and vata (cotton wool) underwent a semantic shift and acquired new negative meanings which can now be used to refer to the opposing groups in hostile communication. The chapter highlights semantic aspects of the words ukrop and vata that make them particularly suitable for use in dehumanizing metaphors, but the main focus of the study is the grammatical changes ukrop and vata underwent as a result of the semantic shift. Used in their traditional senses, both nouns function as uncountable, mass, inanimate nouns. However, novel uses of these words as slurs prompt some unconventional grammatical structures. For example, vata now demonstrates some non-standard subject-verb agreement patterns, and ukrop is sometimes used as a countable noun when it refers to people. Ukrop, used in its new sense, is also moving from the inanimate to the animate noun class. This discussion of the deviations from the grammatical norm expands into a conversation of the connections between the linguistic changes these words are undergoing and extralinguistic context of their use.

What should be revitalized? This chapter considers possible targets for revitalization, taking into account factors such as available resources, whether the language is still spoken, in what domains and by whom. Different people in language revitalization movements have different aims and motivations, and choices must be made about what varieties should be prioritized (including elements of language such as topics, registers and vocabulary). The needs and desires of new and old speakers need to be balanced, with compromises between those who want to preserve a ‘pure’ variety of language and what people actually do - particularly new speakers, as the language expands into new domains and new terminology is needed. In the capsules, an activist describes his realisation that for revitalization purposes he needed to give up looking for ‘the pure Wymysiöeryś language’ and start listening to what people were actually saying. Purist attitudes to Spanish influence on Nahuatl are explored, showing how they had counter-productive effects on language survival. Some activists are now starting to encourage young people to create neologisms from within the heritage language.

Assesses how Quintus’ interval poetics is revealed in the compositional components of the poem. Analyses the formal aspects of the Posthomerica: vocabulary, formulae, similes and gnomai. Argues that rather than constituting imitatio cum uariatione, these features offer the reader a series of lenses through which to view the poet’s conception of the Homeric text and his understanding of his role in creating more of it.