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The present paper analyzes 111 contact-induced hybrid lexical blends in contemporary Serbian, i.e. new words which combine two other words belonging to different languages, namely English and Serbian. It aims at determining: (a) the preferences (if any) for the arrangement of the blends’ source words as to whether they are native or non-native, (b) (the frequencies of) the blending mechanisms, (c) the semantics of the blends, including their semantic transparency, as well as (d) some social aspects of the blends’ use. Additionally, the results obtained herein are compared with those for the contact-induced hybrid Spanish-English blends (BALTEIRO 2017) to determine whether the tendencies observed for the Serbian data are also characteristic of the Spanish data. The results show that: (a) non-native or English words tend to be arranged first, as well as fully preserved, as opposed to native words which are normally clipped if appear in first position, (b) discontinuous overlapping blends and blends of two full source words which necessarily overlap constitute the majority of the data, (c) most of the hybrid blends are of the attributive endocentric type, being fairly semantically transparent, and that (d) the Serbian hybrid blends are generally used in those social contexts such as advertising, business and product naming, or entertainment where linguistic creativity is not only highly desirable, but may have an important social function in creatively expressing identities. Finally, the comparative analysis indicates that there are fairly similar formal and semantic tendencies in the creation of the Serbian and Spanish hybrid blends.

The present paper investigates the two data sets of Serbian lexical blends by applying a typology of the four blending techniques (i.e. complete blending, contour blending, semi-complete blending, and fragment blending) scaled according to the relative morphosemantic transparency of the resulting blends, as proposed by Ronneberger-Sibold (2006, pp. 168-169) for German blends, with the aim of determining whether the users of contemporary Serbian are able to consciously and deliberately use the different degrees of morphosemantic transparency of blends for achieving various communicative purposes, namely humorous-satirical purposes and purposes of brand naming. Additionally, the paper aims to compare and contrast these results with the results obtained by Ronneberger-Sibold (2006) for 612 German satirical blends and brand names, thereby examining differences and similarities between the two typologically different languages. The data collection for the qualitative and quantitative analyses consists of 202 humorous-satirical blends and 102 brand names created by humorists, satirists, journalists, branding or marketing agencies, manufacturers, etc. The examples of blends are partly taken from a number of existing studies into Serbian blends and partly collected from a wide variety of sources including literary works, (political) satirical shows, journalistic media, official websites of companies and other manufacturers, etc., as well as by field research methods. The results of the analyses show that the creators of the Serbian humorous-satirical blends and brand names are actually well aware of the varying degrees of morphosemantic transparency of blends produced by the four blending techniques and are perfectly able to utilize these techniques for fulfilling various communicative functions. In addition, it has been shown that the users of the Serbian blends tend to prefer the same blending techniques as the users of the German blends (Ronneberger-Sibold, 2006, p. 175) for the creation of humorous-satirical blends and brand names, respectively, though not in the same proportions.