Abstract
The idea that words come in two ‘modes of existence’, actual and potential, is a commonplace of modern morphology. The main purpose of the present paper is to argue that, instead of this dichotomy, a trichotomy of actual, potential and virtual words is needed. The necessity of distinguishing two ‘modes of existence’ among non-actual words stems from their different behaviour with respect to ‘blocking by word’:1while potential words (in my terminology) are possible bases of word-formation rules, it is shown that this is not the case for what I call virtual words (that is, blocked words). Since blocking by word is central for my argumentation, recent theories of blocking by word are reviewed and critically assessed.
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