Pragmatic deviations in translation of lexical blends within socio-political discourse

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Pragmatic deviations in translation of lexical blends within socio-political discourse

Olena Medvid

PhD in Philology, Associate Professor,

Germanic Philology Department Sumy State University

Kateryna Vashyst

MA in Philology, Lecturer,

Foreign Languages Department,

Sumy State University

У статті аналізуються нові тенденції та процеси у словотворенні, роль аналогії та внутрішньомовних запозичень як значущих джерел і шляхів поповнення словникового складу англійської мови, що впроваджуються наразі майже в усі мови світу та суттєво впливають на їх розвиток. Серед найпродуктивніших засобів словотворення останнім часом все більшого поширення набуває блендинг. Бленди як номінативні одиниці, що складаються з двох або більше слів, із скороченням принаймні одного з них у місці з'єднання, є невід'ємною рисою англійської мови загалом і сучасного англійського політичного дискурсу, зокрема. Лексичні бленди потрібні для позначення нових понять та явищ і часто є одним із виявів словотворчої майстерності автора; вони стають популярними завдяки своїй виразності та новизні форми і змісту. Метою статті є дослідження функціональних особливостей блендингу як засобу посилення прагматичної складової політичного дискурсу, а також стратегій та прийомів їх перекладу. Використання прагмалінгвістичних елементів (англ.: blends у нашому випадку) передбачає дослідження зв'язків між мовними одиницями та умовами комунікативно-прагматичного простору, відстеження зв'язку між інтенційним компонентом адресата та вибором мовних засобів при перекладі досліджуваних одиниць в межах політичного дискурсу іншою мовою, українською зокрема. Методологія дослідження поєднує традиційні наукові методи з новими лінгвістичними системно-функціональними прийомами. Значення роботи полягає в тому, що систематизовано теоретичний матеріал з проблеми дослідження, проаналізовано функціональні та перекладацькі труднощі блендів, зокрема запропоновано аналогічні моделі передачі українською мовою англомовних політичних блендів. Результати доводять актуальність дослідження, яке дозволило отримати нові дані щодо технік, ефективних для іншомовної передачі смислів блендин- гових одиниць, що виникли останнім часом у соціо-політичному дискурсі. Принципи цих прийомів можуть бути універсальними і використовуватись для подальших досліджень, зокрема перекладу англомовних лексичних блендів, спонукаючи до інноваційних засобів вербокреації, наприклад, у флективних мовах, де зазначене явище є нетиповим. Цей процес гіпотетично свідчить, що наразі відбувається перерозподіл складових у межах структур та систем різних мов і активується здатність їх до реорганізації.

Ключові слова: політичний дискурс, блендинг, бленд, словотвірний елемент, перекладацькі техніки, прагматичні девіації.

PRAGMATIC DEVIATIONS IN TRANSLATION OF LEXICAL BLENDS WITHIN POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Olena M. Medvid, Sumy State University (Ukraine).

Key words: political discourse, blending, blend innovation, word-forming element, translation technique, pragmatic deviations.

The research touches upon the innovations in the English word formation processes, i.e., the role of analogy and intralingual borrowings as significant sources and ways of replenishing English vocabulary, interfering entirely with all the languages in the world and greatly influencing their development. Nominative units consisting of two or more words with a contraction of at least one of them at the place of a junction, i.e., blends, are an integral feature of the English language in general and modern English socio-political discourse in particular. Blending has been growing recently among the most productive means of word formation. Blends are needed to denote new concepts and phenomena and are often used to manifest the author's word-formation skills; they become popular due to their expressiveness and novelty of form and content. The goal of the article is to study the functional features of blends as a means of strengthening the pragmatic component of the socio-political discourse, as well as the strategy and techniques of their translation.

The general and special methods were used to achieve the goal and objectives of the study: information retrieval method - to select research material and process basic theoretical knowledge; generalization method - to highlight the most critical academic positions; deduction and induction - to clarify the theoretical foundations, generalize data and formulate conclusions; discourse analysis - to identify specific communicative and pragmatic features of socio-political communication; contextual and functional methods - to actualize the linguopragmatic meaning of the lexical units under the study, i.e., blends; the vocabulary definitions analysis - to examine their linguopragmatic peculiarities; structural- semantic and component analysis - to determine the ways of blend formation and their main structural elements - all this is necessary for the implementation of translation analysis.

The use of pragmalinguistic elements (blends, in our case) involves investigating relationships between language units and the conditions of the communicative-pragmatic space, tracing the relationship between the addressee's intentional component and the choice of language means when translating the studied units within the socio-political discourse into another language.

Conclusions. Regarding the focus of socio-political discourse on speech influence, the conveying of blend stylistics and the transfer of speech realia that form the basis of the blend implication and strengthen the socio-pragmatics of the given text cause difficulties in comprehending the English original and translation variants. The study of the translation aspect of blends within socio-political discourse revealed a lot of challenges, such as the need for a unique means for conveying blend semantics in the translation language, the complex nature of blend explication, and the problem of their interpretation.

Among the translation techniques that are most effective in overcoming the outlined translation difficulties of socio-political blends, such ones should be mentioned first: transcription, transliteration, tracing, and creating an analogical model. The descriptive translation method is considered inappropriate when translating political blends (under research) because such a technique does not allow conveying pragmatics of blends and implement them in the translation language as expressive lexical and stylistic units that are components of speech influence on the addressee, and the society as a whole. The principles of the techniques studied in the article can be used for further research as being universal for translating English blends in inflectional languages (Ukrainian including), where such a phenomenon is non-typical. The process of blending hypothetically proves the activation of the redistribution of components within the different language structures and systems and their ability to self-reorganize.

Introduction

The lexical level of language is the most flexible among other levels and responds instantly to changes in people's lives. Moreover, the renewal of the lexical structure has become rapid in the modern era of information technology when language is the primary tool for manipulating mass consciousness. A clear example of such manipulation is the contemporary socio-political discourse in which politicians' speeches are the leading source of their influence on voters. Many expressions and lexemes used lately in the socio-political discourse have become popular and serve as a basis for deriving new words.

Blending has been growing recently among the most productive ways of word formation. Blends, as nominative units consisting of two or more words with a contraction of at least one of them at the place of the junction, are an integral feature of the English language in general and modern English socio-political discourse in particular. Such lexemes are stylistically marked, have an interesting structure, and attract society's attention. At the same time, blends effectively convey the meanings of modern phenomena that arise in society. They extend their structure, combining not only two but three and even more words at a time, thus, having a more extensive range of expression possibilities than words formed using other traditional word-formation techniques.

The issue of word formation and blending as a type of word formation in English was studied by G. Wentworth [1934], N. Chomsky [1970], J. Algeo [1977, 1978], R. Quirk [1985], G. Cannon [1986], L. Bauer [2001], D. Crystal [2003], O. Bat-El [2005], S.Th. Gries [2006], A. Enarson [2007], G. Fauconnier and M. Turner [2008] and other foreign scientists. Ukrainian linguists T.R. Tymoshenko [1975], L.F. Omelchenko [1980], Yu.A. Zhluktenko, V.P. Berezinsky, I.I. Borisenko [1983], A.P. Prokopets [2005], O.O. Selivanova [2008], I.M. Savchyn [2012], O.V. Tkachyk [2013], Yu.A. Zatsny [2013], S.O. Shvachko [2017], S.M. Yenikeieva [2007, 2011], O.L. Harmash [2017], L.M. Chumak [2018], and others are also interested in this phenomenon.

In particular, the peculiarities of the creation and functioning of blending units in Ukrainian, as a language of the Slavic branch, which has become a dynamic pragma-stylistic phenomenon of the Ukrainian language discourse in recent decades, were studied by linguists O.A. Styshov [2005], N.F. Klymenko [2000, 2008], S.S. Lukyanenko [2009], N.V. Stratulat [2011], O.M. Turchak [2013], A.M. Nelyuba [2014], Zh.V. Kolois [2015], I.O. Korobova [2016], O.O. Taranenko [2015], V.P. Oleksenko [2021], Ye.A. Karpilovska [2022], and others. A lot of our research is devoted to the peculiarities of the linguopragmatic organization of socio-political discourse, including its translation aspect, which is studied by I.S. Shevchenko [2008], O.M. Medvid [2012], S.M. Yenikeieva [2017], O.V. Popova [2017], A.P. Martynyuk [2022], etc. Still, the issue of blending as a linguistic means of strengthening the socio-political discourse pragmatic component needs to be investigated more, especially from the point of view of lexical blend interpretation while being translated into other languages considering their specifics both at the structural level and semantic one, which determines the relevance of the study of the 21-st century socio-political discourse innovative vocabulary.

The article's relevance is determined firstly by the need to study blends, the specific layer of vocabulary, as the number of new lexical units is constantly increasing, particularly within the socio-political discourse. It is due to some reasons, including, on the one hand, the growing public interest in the latest socio-political phenomena and their nominations; on the other hand, the appeal of politicians to the new forms of communication with voters, in particular, which makes them popular among various categories of society. Consequently, new concepts and realities emerge that require language units to nominate them. Despite the considerable scholarly interest, these lexical items have yet to be the subject of a comprehensive systematic linguistic and translation analysis within socio-political discourse.

The goal of the study is to analyze the functional features of blends as a means of strengthening the pragmatic component of the socio-political discourse, as well as the strategy and techniques of their translation.

The study's empirical material is blended lexical units from Op-Ed texts of articles on socio-political problems in English and Ukrainian language Internet publications selected by graduate students of the Germanic Languages Department while working in the LinguaStar translation center of the Sumy State University.

Methodology

The use of pragmalinguistic elements (English/Ukrainian blends, in our case) involves the investigation of relationships between language units and the conditions of the communicative- pragmatic space, tracing the relationship between the addressee's intentional component and the choice of language means when translating the studied units within the socio-political discourse in another language.

The general and special methods to achieve the goal and objectives of the study were used: information retrieval method - to select research material and process basic theoretical knowledge; generalization method - to highlight the most critical academic positions; deduction and induction - to clarify the theoretical foundations, generalize data and formulate conclusions; discourse analysis - to identify specific communicative and pragmatic features of political communication; contextual and functional methods - to actualize the linguopragmatic meaning of the lexical units under the study, i.e., blends; the vocabulary definitions analysis - to examine their linguopragmatic peculiarities; structural-semantic and component analysis - to determine the ways of blend formation and their main structural elements - all this is necessary for the implementation of translation analysis, which needs in addition the aspects of conceptual analysis, while rendering blending lexical units from one language to another, taking into account social, cultural, historical, communicative, and other extra-linguistic factors of the discourse.

Theoretical issues: Linguistic essence of blending

Along with traditional types of word formation, such as affixation, compounding, clipping, conversion, or abbreviation, etc., words formed by merging morphemes and their parts due to the process called blending increasingly appear (not only in English as a source of this phenomenon). Thus, the significance of different word-forming types in the system is redistributed due to language evolution. If, in the first half of the 20th century, lexical blends were few in English, and therefore this method of word formation was exotic, by the end of the century, the number of words formed by merging increased so much that they became common in English, and appeared in other linguistic structures, different from English [Green, 1991; Thurner, 1993; Зацний, 2008; Algeo, J., 2010; Нелюба, 2014; Тараненко, 2015; Гармаш, 2017; Єнікєєва, 2017, etc.].

The development of blending as a type of word formation occurred under intensive use within such language styles as scientific, advertising, and journalistic, actively observed in the 20th - 21st centuries. This evolution also postulated specific requirements for the language units, such as brevity in the transfer of information, ease of pronunciation, the ability to participate in word-changing processes, etc.

Linguists interpret the analyzed word-forming process and the units of this word-forming type, called blends, differently. As indicated yet by G. Wentworth [1933], none of the classes of words, processes, and phenomena in the language has as many designations as blends (English variants: contamination, portmanteau-word, portmanteau, blend, blend-word, amalgam, amalgam-word, amalgam-form, fusion, fusion-word, composite, composite-word, overlapping-word, conflation, coalesced-word, coalescence-form, telescope-word, telescoped-word, hybrid, analogical-neologism, brunch-word, counter-word, cross-form, word-blending [Algeo, 1977], as well as humorous nominations: suitcase-word, timanteau word (blending of two stems - time + portmanteau), blund (blunder + blend) [Onions, 1966]). As we can see, even some of the terms used to denote blends are blends themselves. The reason for the appearance of numerous terms is the lack of clear criteria for the definitions of extraordinary, structurally, and semantically telescoping units and the lack of research on the mentioned phenomenon.

Despite the voluminous history of the research done by scientists blending is still an ambiguous notion starting with its nomination. Our analysis of allonym definitions of the recently popular terms for blending lexical units of the English language proves that “contamination" and “telescope" are very generalized and do not have evident linguistic characteristics; instead, the terms “blend" and “hybrid" (in addition, the English term “hybrid" itself is the result of two words fusion “half" and “bred" (past participle from the verb “breed" - “to give birth", “generate") have relevant linguistic meanings and can be considered as metasigns of the phenomenon under study. The calculation of the semantic distance coefficient of the metasigns definitions of the specified phenomenon under study (according to S. G. Berezhan's formula) shows that the most appropriate terminological nominations are “blend" and “hybrid" [Швачко, Медвідь, 2013]. In foreign linguistics, scientists prefer the term nomination “blend words" for lexical units of such telescopic word-formation type [Hockett, 1968; Dufva, 1992; Enarson, 2006; Gries, 2006; Lehrer, 2007; etc.]

Ukrainian linguists do not stay away from studying this extraordinary phenomenon in the lexicology of the English language, which, under the influence of many socio-political factors, began to spread very quickly throughout the world in the second half of the 20th century. There is still a debate about the place of blending non-standard lexical units that do not obey any rules of grammar in the derivational system of the modern English language: blending needs to be clearly distinguished from other paradigms within word formation processes. There are as many points of view as there are authors in the field. Yu.A. Zhluktenko (back in the 80s of the 20^th cent.) notes that blending nominations, like compound words, reflect the tendency to univerbalize and rationalize the language and demonstrate a different degree of dissection and motivation. Due to the hidden clipped components, the degree of their dissection and motivation is lower than in compound words. The linguist concludes that blending is an independent word-formation type found between compounding and abbreviation [Жлуктенко, Березинский, Борисенко, 1983]. We assume (following Zhluktenko) that it is impossible to attribute the specified type of word formation to any of the traditional means because such lexical units do not have a prototype in the language; they are initially generated in the minds of native speakers, and then enter the language as full-fledged units. Although they often have an occasional character, their life is limited not only by the pragmatics of discourse but also by a specific speech situation, which does not limit their right to exist in another context and discourse under other socio-pragmatic conditions, depending on formal syntagmatic (morphological, grammatical, syntactic) requirements of a particular language. L. Chumak [2018] notes that two processes occur during the formation of blends: the truncation of the derivative words or at least one of them and the merging of these “splinters" or the truncated word with the complete one. Blending words differ from compound words because their structural components (“splinters") are dependent forms and cannot function freely in the language [Чумак, 2018].

The Ukrainian school of researchers of this non-traditional type of word formation in the system of English lexical units, which flooded the vocabulary of various languages of the world, including Ukrainian, was initially based on the well-known foreign linguists' works (see above), which mainly considered the mechanisms of innovative word formation under analysis from the structural-semantic point of view, taking into account the internal potential of the English language analytical structure [Prokopets, 2005; Selivanova, 2008; Tkachyk, 2013; etc.]. The impulse for studying the process of extrapolation of pro-English methods of word formation in the Ukrainian language, considering the “bifunctionality" of linguistic signs (their representation in the language both in the form of lexemes and in the form of word-formation elements), was made by Yu.A. Zatsny (since the 70s of the 20th century). He highlighted the potential possibilities of generating new methods of word formation, in particular blending, in other languages of the world (Ukrainian including), carefully analyzing its translation capabilities from the English language. Furthermore, the scientist showed the lacunae for new research paradigms of studying the essence of blending functioning and creation [Зацный, Янков, 2013]. Recently, much attention has been given to the cognitive and synergetic nature of linguistic blending.

In this study, following Yu. Zatsny, we also support S. Yenikeieva's approach, which singles out blending as an independent way of word formation regarding the fact that the formation of blends involves both “mechanisms of contraction of derivative stems (which are leading in word formation) and mechanisms of shortening and fragmentation of words (which is typical for form formation)" [Єнікєєва, 2007, p. 268]. Moreover, our interest is caused by the wide use of synergistic ideas in S. Yenikeieva's research, from the linguosynergetics point of view, which is defined as “an applied field of synergistic description of linguistic phenomena" [Селіванова, 2008]. She investigates the phenomenon of blending through synergoderivatology [Єнікєєва, 2011], the extrapolation of ideas and principles of synergy to a word formation, in particular blending, which contributes to the identification of self-regulation and self-organization mechanisms of the mentioned process. The reasons for this are the diversity of constituents of word formation, crosslevel relations with other language endosystems, and the dynamism of functioning and evolution. Many aspects related to the word-formation structural organization, the dynamics of verb- creative processes, and the ways and means of its development have not been adequately covered due to the limitations of traditional approaches. Synergetics, with its principles of disequilibrium, emergence, non-linearity, and autopoetics, as noted by S. Yenikeieva, opens up new opportunities for establishing the principles of this transsystem structure, identifying the principles of its development through self-organization and determining the scenarios of its evolution [Єнікєєва, 2011].

J. Algeo, in his research, mentions Lewis Carroll, a prominent writer who created many occasional blends in his books and considered blends to be the words contained two meanings in one word [Algeo, 2010], regarding the fact that the form of a word follows its meaning, that is concept goes first. This idea attracts the attention of scientists studying the cognitive paradigm in linguistics. The results of comprehending the world are fixed not only at the cognitive level through the lexicalization of concepts but also, as O.L. Garmash [2017] claims, at the metacogni- tive level through morpholized metaconcepts. The phenomena of lexicalization of morpholized metaconcepts, morpholization of lexicalized concepts, paraphraseologizing, and telescoping can be illustrative examples of the transition of randomness into regularity. It should be noted that the lexicalization of morpholized metaconcepts is a mental mechanism for the formation of lexicalized concepts based on morpholized metaconcepts. Because of this process, we can get a bifunctional concept, based on the original mental unit, with a new function realized [Гармаш, 2018 p. 105], which is typical for lexical blends in particular. The constant movement of the components within the system leads to the changeability of specific components within the concept itself. The changes concern not only and not so much the fact of producing a new word as a completely new sign (semantically and structurally) [Gries, 2006]. Hence, we can observe a change in the verbal explication of the concept, changes in the semantic spectrum of the concept, the visual image of the concept, and the establishment of new correlations in the concept system as a whole.

Thus, several questions relating to the nature of blending are still to be discussed: whether it is more cognitive or more affective, congruent or incongruent, automatic or controlled, spontaneous or systemic. We assume that studying within cognitive and synergetic linguistics should be used in the new interdisciplinary path of blending research, which describes how language interacts with cognition, its dynamics, and self-organizing properties, to fill the lacunae in different branches of linguistic and extra-linguistic studies.

Furthermore, the analysis of the corpora under our research proves that the use of blends is widespread now in not only languages with analytical structure, but this trend towards language economy and increasing the semantic capacity of lexical units is becoming popular also in Slavic languages (whose grammatical structure is synthetic, that is not so flexible for blending). Though there are fewer examples of blends in the dictionaries of these languages, the search for empirical material for analysis led us to different Internet websites, which are full of innovation samples, including Ukrainian lexical blends.

Ukrainian linguists face the issue of studying lexical blending on Ukrainian-speaking soil, the first attempts to analyze the word-forming models of Ukrainian blending appear, and the dynamics of its development create new lacunae for study [Styshov, 2005]; Klymenko, 2000; Nelyuba, 2014; Kolois, 2015; Taranenko, 2015; Korobova, 2016; and others]. The author of lexical and word-forming innovations dictionaries, A.M. Nelyuba [2014], states the fact that at the beginning of the 21^st century, “regarding the rapid development of Internet media, in which word-forming possibilities are becoming extremely dynamic, causing the diversity of the innovative structure, the number of derivatives of blended origin has increased significantly" [Нелюба, 2014, p.113], which requires their careful analysis. As part of the study of internal borrowings, the word-forming potential of the language is studied by O.O. Taranenko. From our point of view, the research by O.O. Taranenko, which considers prognostic problems in linguistics to be a priority, is worthy of attention. His attempts to build a research concept for the analysis of changes in the derivational system of the Ukrainian language, turning to both typical forms and atypical structural-semantic models of word formation (yet in 2015), as we can see, find actualization today. The author does not simply present a picture of the relevant dynamic fragments of modern Ukrainian word formation but brings the scientific search into the existence of the language -- the social context that motivates and implements the intentions of the language society [Тараненко, 2015]. Our research encompasses a comprehensive consideration of this thesis.

Recently, the socio-political content of the Ukrainian Internet discourse has been filled with new vocabulary, increasing the lexicon of the modern Ukrainian language at the expense of structurally and semantically innovative lexical units, emotionally charged, often having pejorative pragmatics. The socio-political processes taking place in Ukraine, starting from November 2013, have undergone a broad linguistic expression caused by the psychophysiological reactions of people to the observed events. The number of occasional word formations that instantly gain popularity as independent lexemes and corresponding hashtags indicate that these linguistic units should become the object of basic research. Such lexemes and lexicalized compounds represent innovative processes in the Ukrainian language's lexical-semantic system and demonstrate various word formation methods.

Special attention is paid in our study to translating texts of socio-political discourse, particularly to nominative units in the texts that perform a socio-pragmatic function of communicative influence on the audience; such linguistic units often may be of blended forms and blended concepts [Медвідь, 2012] (both in English and Ukrainian). The principles of the blend unit creation proposed by the representatives of cognitive linguistics, in our opinion, should be taken into account when translating lexical blends into foreign language discourse, which may cause their structural and semantic deviations. Synchronization of the metacognitive level of the linguistic- mental environment is determined by changes occurring at the cognitive level [Гармаш, 2018]. In particular, it is activated through the effect of analogy: lexical blends formed by analogy cause mental processing and generalization of the subsequent model. Naturally, linguistic innovations are based mainly on our previous linguistic experience.

Discussion and results

Blends as pragmatic components in the socio-political discourse

From the viewpoint of pragmalinguistics, discourse is an activity of the participants of communication aimed at establishing and maintaining contact, emotional and information exchange, creating communication strategies, and influencing each other. Speech influence is one of the types of socio-psychological influence and, in a broad sense, means speech communication in terms of its purposefulness [Медвідь, 2012]. Speech influence, according to I. Shevchenko, is a way to change the intentional sphere of a person's inner world by modifying individual fragments of his/her knowledge structure (IKS - individual cognitive space). She defines speech influence as the influence on a person by means of speech, which aims to persuade him/her to take a particular point of view or decide to take some action consciously, transfer information through CCS - collective cognitive space [Шевченко, Морозова, 2003]. O.V. Popova notes that the communicative influence is a speech act of an addresser, which is guided by the communication intention and the discourse practice of a particular communication sphere, aimed at changing thinking, mental state of the addressee, and his/her assessment of any phenomenon regardless of the communicative interaction type [Попова, 2017].

The political discourse texts aim to implement speech influence on the audience (voters) and have a solid pragmatic orientation. Political discourse reflects the political situation, and its nature depends on the existing state and social system. K. ReiB [1976] calls texts that can influence the recipient's behavior and contain explicit or implicit impulses of such behavior operative. Regarding this definition of the operative type of texts, we consider the texts of political discourse operative because one of their primary functions is influence.

Various language and speech means are used to implement this function, that is, the communicative influence of the political text on the message recipient. Having analyzed different aspects of the communicative influence, the scientists consider the following speech influence levels: phonological, prosodic, somatic, morpho-syntactic, lexico-semantic, and pragmalinguistic.

In this study, we are interested in the lexico-semantic and pragmalinguistic levels, where lexical units are the primary means. Due to the variety of linguistic semantics, the choice of words is a universal tool through which various influences are implemented. Although any lexical unit, depending on the context and intentions of the author, can have the potential for influence, stylistic means and figures are of particular importance in terms of influence power: idioms, phraseological units, metaphors, comparisons, irony, hyperbole, lexical repetitions, and other tropes.

S. Yenikeieva considers blends as lexical, stylistic, and pragmalinguistic means of speech influence and refers blending to the ways of realizing the play of words in a political text. The researcher believes that the game revolves around the struggle of ideologies in political discourse. It has such properties of communication as theatricality and drama, used by an individual to exploit the inherent language opportunities to present human needs [Єникєєва, Єнікєєв, 2017]. According to I. Shevchenko [2017], since the masses perceive politics through the mass media, theatricality is one of the constitutive characteristics of political discourse. Politicians always seek to impress the public by developing language strategies and tactics to create an attractive image for the people. The presentation function of the blending type of words used in speeches is manifested in its ability to the vivid emotional reflection of reality and the development of a dramatic (or theatrical) component of political discourse.

The ability to produce the most expressive lexical units is implemented by blending derivation at the cognitive level. As O. Harmash notes, this happens due to the development of the cognitive ability of native speakers to create new cognitive models through the linguistic arrangement of knowledge [Гармаш, 2018], and therefore, the new conceptual material encourages people to reproduce non-standard linguistic mechanisms for the formation or transformation of linguistic units to achieve the effect of expressiveness in communication due to the structural and semantic possibilities of a language.

Consider in more detail the role of blends in strengthening the pragmatic value of socio-political discourse. Thus, blending is often used to convey new realia that has caused a resonance in society, which arises at the intersection of political, economic, and social spheres of life. Such lexemes include the following blends, which are found in the texts of English-language publications: meritocracy < merit + aristocracy = knowledgeable people, chavalanche < chav + avalanche = gang of teenagers, stagflation < stagnation + inflation = period of economic stagnation with simultaneous inflation, corporatocracy < corporate + democracy = power of corporations, etc.

For example, the blend word meritocracy is commonly used in socio-political discourse as part of the theory that power should belong to people distinguished by their achievements, abilities, and professional competence rather than by social background or status. Accordingly, such a blend is used to nominate talented politicians. It can be used in political discourse texts to implement a politician's self-presentation strategy, creating a positive image of a politician or political party as a whole.

The blend chavalanche is a realia of the UK social life. It refers to white teenagers or young people from the working class characterized by antisocial and aggressive behavior. Usually, this social group has a stable image of uneducated people who have unskilled jobs or live on social payments, wear clothes with bright logos (traditionally with the symbols of the British company “Burberry"), and massive jewelry. An abbreviated version of the blend chavalanche is chav, often used in the texts of periodicals on political and social issues.

Another political blend realia is the name of a political phenomenon when a politician seeks complete information on some subject. Such behavior of a politician is nominated as fac- trip = fact + trip.

Corporatocracy is used in the media to denote the trend of power concentration over society's political and economic life in the hands of large corporations, which determine the further vector of social development guided by corporate interests and the principles of enrichment. This concept is used concerning the most economically and politically developed countries, especially the United States.

Other uses of blends in socio-political texts may include the names of various political organizations, such as the Daughters of American Revolution, which operates in the United States and is abbreviated DAR, combined with the word darling forms the blend DARling. In addition to the names of organizations, other proper names may be involved in the blend formation in political discourse, such as the names of politicians, as in the case of Billary = Bill + Hillary - a married couple of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The highly active blending word-formation process in the US socio-political discourse can be considered the election campaign of 2015-2016 when a fierce political struggle was waged between D. Trump and H. Clinton. The US election campaign generated many neologisms, created by politicians and voters, thus representing a means of moral influence and a response to it, to some extent. It was the period when the English vocabulary was replenished with such blend words associated with the name of presidential candidate Donald Trump as "trumponomics" - Trump's economic policy, "trumpflation", etc. It is characteristic that the use of these blends in the candidates' speech is most ironic and generally serves as one of the stylistic means of implementing the strategy of discrediting the opponent. For example, in criticizing Clinton's political campaign, Trump uses occasionalism Hillarycare by analogy with the previously formed neologism Obamacare, associated with a critical US health care reform bill that President Obama sought to implement. The use of the occasional blend Hillarycare thus criticizes Clinton's actions. This criticism directly indicates that Hillary Clinton is a successor in her political views to the previous president.

One of the most exciting examples of occasional blends related to the US election campaign in 2015-2016 was the appearance of the negative nomination Killary, a blend of the verb kill and the name of the presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In this case, the negative connotation of the new way of nominating a politician is obvious; the contexts in which the word Killary appears tend to reinforce the authors' negative affitudes toward Clinton.

Blending acquires the status of a productive word-formation type in English socio-political discourse because some components of blend units are becoming popular and are serial by their nature. In such cases, the clipped "splinter" is no longer correlated only with the source lexical unit but is perceived as a structural element with a specific function and semantics. It becomes a real lexeme, such as -verse (world, union), -rati (noble society). In socio-political media discourse, there are examples of the use of such elements: the word Googleverse < Google + universe = products, services, and technologies owned by Google, as well as any web pages, groups, images, etc., i.e., everything that is possible to find through Google search engine; the blend with the use of the element -rati, such as Twitterati < Twitter + literati, which means representatives of the elite, celebrities, politicians who actively use the social network Twitter and attract the attention of many fans, is also gaining popularity.

Therefore, the concept of "blending" is relevant to the sphere of English-language socio-political discourse. It vividly reflects changes in society's political life, revealing the need to denote new realities and concepts. Often, new phenomena are complex concepts for the representation of which blending is best suited. Due to their expressiveness and informative capacity, blends exert the most significant influence on the message recipients.

Challenges in translating English blends within the socio-political discourse

Structural and semantic features of English blends and their role in socio-political discourse (blends are used to nominate complex concepts and socio-cultural realities) cause difficulties in their translation into Ukrainian as an inflectional language (opposed to analytical English); blending is structurally alien to the Ukrainian language.

When translating socio-political discourse, a translator often comes across unusual lexemes to which blends also belong, and therefore he/she should know how to interpret these units. But although blending as a way of generating structurally and semantically extraordinary lexemes is recognized as a peripheral way of word formation in English, it is gaining popularity in many world languages, creating some difficulties for a translator. In the pair "English - Ukrainian", the number of units of this type prevails in the English language, and the search for translation matches of English blends in the Ukrainian language is significantly complicated and limited.

When we consider the peculiarities of translating blends as an element of the pragmatic component, it should be noted that in socio-political discourse, the concept of value is predominant, and the translator must reproduce it in the target text regarding the value hierarchy of different cultures. Moral and ethnic values, closely related to the peculiarities of the national mentality and temperament, play a unique role in political argumentation [Белова, 2003, p. 37]. When the conceptual pictures of the world do not match, such features as national mentality, consciousness, character, and the degree and adequacy of the reality reflected in the language can become a significant obstacle to communication [ReiB, 1976].

A difference in the conceptual and linguistic pictures of the world of communicators makes a translator's task extremely difficult. The purpose of translating socio-political discourse is to achieve the reaction from a foreign-language addressee that is similar to the response of a source text addressee (sometimes the translator has to look for some other values using which the pragmatics of the source discourse unit preserved). In general, values do not exist in culture isolated but form a value picture of the world. Linguistically, they can be described as cultural concepts that are multidimensional and culturally significant socio-psychological formations in the collective consciousness [Мартинюк, Ахмедова 2022]. This kind of ethnic concept provokes the most considerable translation challenges, requiring deep background knowledge of the translator. At the same time, there is rarely a situation of the complete absence of a concept in a particular linguistic culture; this phenomenon occurs less often than the absence of a one-word nomination for a specific concept. It means that any concept can be translated from one language into another, possibly reducing/expanding the text or another verbal form representation. Differences between cultures, in general, can be manifested in the quantitative and combinatorial variability of the choice of features in the world conceptualization. To explain the peculiarities of such a choice of features, the translator must refer to the language and other people's extralingual aspects like history, psychology, philosophy, and culture. Difficulties in translating socio-political discourse are often caused by the use of specific terms depending on the relevant ideological concepts [Шевченко, 2008]. For instance, the widespread use of names and titles in political speeches presupposes considerable prior (background) knowledge of the translator, which allows him/her to correlate the name with the named object. A political text, especially if it is a prepared politician's speech, involves the clever use of specific expressive lexical units (including blends), the goal of which is to enhance the text's emotional perception, win the addressee's sympathy, and force him/her to empathize, perceive, adopt and share the desired for the addresser emotional state [Таценко, 2017, p. 259]. Emotional information is more accessible, perceived, and better remembered by the audience; it is a more natural and effective way to influence the recipient.

Therefore, the political blend prebituary (preliminary + obituary) is a big challenge for translation due to its structural, semantic, pragmatic, and lingua-cultural aspects that the translator should consider to translate this unit adequately while maintaining its functions in the political text. The linguistic component of this blend does not contain international words, which are often part of political terms and make translation easier. The literal translation of the blend prebituary is "попередній некролог" (poperedniy nekroloh - "previous obituary"). This lexeme reflects the worldview peculiarities of the English culture because such a phenomenon is absent in the Ukrainian one. In addition, this blend has a vivid pragmatic component. It enhances the pragmatic influence of the political text, giving a sharply pessimistic forecast for a politician, sometimes with an element of irony and traditional English "black humor".

To convey the pragmatic potential of a blend in a translation of a socio-political text, a translator can resort to various translation methods and techniques. We analyze them and their potential in translating socio-political blends under consideration.

Translation techniques of blends within English socio-political discourse

When conveying socio-political blends, a translator must use a number of his/her professional competencies, skills, and abilities to identify the given in the text units, perform their structural and semantic analysis, identify their pragmatic and stylistic features, interpret the underlying national realities and creatively reproduce the identified characteristics in the relevant units of the translation language, preserving the communicative intentions of the author. The combination of these factors gives grounds to assert that the activity of a translator's linguistic personality, his/her thinking, mind, and creative potential are fully involved in the translation of non-standard lexical units, which are blends. The translator perhaps has the most significant influence on how the recipient will perceive the information presented in the text.

In our research, we analyzed the possible variants of blend translation within political discourse to identify fundamental translation techniques used for blending words. Regarding the study results, the main methods of blend conveying are transcription, transliteration, tracing, descriptive translation, selection of correspondence, and translation using an analogical model. We consider each of them in more detail, involving examples in the research's corpus.

Due to the complexity of blend translation, translators rarely resort to creative translation methods and forming analogical blend models; translation requires much effort and is challenging. Therefore, transliteration (or transcription) is often used, and sometimes even borrowing, when the blend word is taken from the original English text without changes and transferred to the translated text, maintaining its graphic characteristics. We see examples of such translations when sharing the blend Obamacare in the Ukrainian media. Thus, there is a translation variant of this lexeme through transcription, where an attempt is made to convey the pronunciation of the English word using the Ukrainian language:

(1) Трамп закликав республіканців не припиняти спроби скасувати Обамакер ([Obamaker] - Ukrainian transcription of Obamacare) [Час-Time, 2017].

'Trump urged Republicans not to stop trying to repeal Obamacare'.

It preserves the blending structure of the source word (proper name Obama and noun care) and the national, cultural, and pragmatic components of the lexeme.

The term Obamacare is used as a short name for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and lately, its use has been so widespread that it has become almost official and known quite by everybody. It includes the reform author's name and the keyword of the common name, thus providing the most concise information about the project, performing an expressive function through its non-standard structure, and simultaneously revealing the tendency of the English language to brevity and blending. The proposed translation options reproduce these functions but may be incomprehensible to the recipient without background knowledge about the bill. Even more difficult to understand may be the translated version in the form of a graphic borrowing:

(2) Президент США Дональд Трамп у четвер підписав указ про зменшення впливу програми Obamacare [Трамп наказав послабити дію Obamacare, 2017].

'On Thursday US President Donald Trump signed a decree to reduce the impact of the Obamacare program'.

In addition to the socio-cultural barrier, there may also be a language barrier: such a translation unit is not adapted for perception by a Ukrainian-speaking reader. However, compared to the previous versions, in the context of this sentence, the lexeme "програма" (prohrama - "program") is provided, which carries some background information about the realia referred to in the text. We consider it more rational to combine the above methods of translation with descriptive translation, e.g.:

(3) The US House of Representatives voted to close Obamacare, the_state_compulsory health insurance program'_ [Obamacare: Has Trump managed, 2019].

'Американська Палата представників проголосувала за згортання Obamacare - державної, програми. обов'язкового, медичного, страхування, (state, program, of compulsory, health.insurance)', (authors' translation).

This version of the translation provides additional information that explains the essence of the realia, and at the same time, the blend itself is preserved.

The translator's neologism is an exciting technique for translating non-standard formations, including blends. This translation technique is rightly considered the most difficult. We suggest our translation of Obamacare within the political discourse by creating neologism Обамастра- хування [Obamastrakhuvannia] (Obamalnsurance - the element Insurance clears up the essence of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act promoted by Obama), for example, in the following discourse fragment: