Contents introduction 2

LISTING AND INSTITUTIONALISATION
Morphological theory provides the tools for analyzing `real' words like shopkeeper and conversations which are listed in dictionaries and which probably most competent, adult speakers of English know. But, if it stopped at that, it would be failing in its task of characterizing the nature of speakers' lexical knowledge. The true English vocabulary goes far beyond the institutionalized words listed in dictionaries. Obviously, a very considerable number of words must simply be memorized, e.g. words made up of a single morpheme - zebra, tree, saddle - there is no way one can work out their meaning. Word formation can be faddish. A word, especially one that captures the spirit of the times, may spawn numerous imitations. Take the 1980s word yuppie, which was formed by adding the suffix spelled as -y or -ie to the initial letters of either `Young Urban Professional Person' or `Young Upwardly Mobile Professional Person'. It spawned imitations like yuppify, yuppidom, yuppette, buppie (`black yuppie'), guppie (`gay yuppie'), etc.
Many of the nonce, non-institionalised words are compounds. If a speaker wants to express an idea which would normally be expressed by a syntactic phrase in a manner that heightens its concreteness and salience, it is possible as a one-off, hyphenated compound. The newspaper columnist Melanie Philips manufactured the word `anything-goes-as-long-as-you-can-get-away-with-it-culture' which is an excellent example of this phenomenon:
`Public life has fallen into disrepute and the cynicism of the people knows no bounds. It's the anything-goes-as-long-as-you-can-get-away-with-it-culture, and it is a prevalent in the corridors of Whitehall as in the joyriders' ghettos' (Philips, 1993).
At the other end of the spectrum old words go out of use, e.g. wone meaning `home, abode' is now obsolete. We can see that wone is opsolete while porret survives in the dialectal use but it is very rare. The line between `dialectal and very rare' and `obsolete' is a fine one.