But is it really a word?

In some sense we now know what words are – or at least what word types, word tokens, and lexemes are. But there’s another way we can ask the question “What’s a word?” Consider the sort of question you might ask when playing Scrabble: “Is aalii a word?” Or when you encounter an unfamiliar word: “Is bouncebackability a word?” What you’re asking when you answer questions like these, is really the question “Is xyz a REAL word?” Our first impulse in answering those questions is to run for our favorite dictionary; if it’s a real word it ought to be in the dictionary.

But think about this answer for just a bit, and you’ll begin to wonder if it makes sense. Who determines what goes in the dictionary in the first place? What if dictionaries differ in whether they list a particular word? For example, the Official Scrabble Player’s Dictionary lists aalii but not bouncebackability. The Oxford English Dictionary On-Line doesn’t list aalii, but it does list bouncebackability. So which one is right? Further, what about words like cot potato or freshmore that don’t occur in any published dictionary yet, but can be encountered in the media? The former, according to Word Spy (www.wordspy.com) means a baby who spends too much time watching television (Americans might use the term crib potato instead of cot potato), and the latter is a second-year high school student in the US who has to repeat a lot of first-year classes. And what about the word cot potatodom, which I just made up? Once you know what a cot potato is, you have no trouble understanding my new word. If it consists of morphemes, has a meaning, and can stand alone, doesn’t it qualify as a word according to our definition even if it doesn’t appear in the dictionary?

What all these questions suggest is that we each have a mental lexicon, a sort of internalized dictionary that contains an enormous number of words that we can produce, or at least understand when we hear them. But we also have a set of word formation rules which allows us to create new words and understand new words when we encounter them. We will explore the nature of our mental lexicon in detail, and think further about the “Is it really a word?” question. In answering this question we’ll be led to a detailed exploration of the nature of our mental lexicon and our word formation rules.