What should stockings look like? On the storage of linguistic units

Stockings are not just a kind of hosiery used to cover--or draw the attention to--a pair of legs. This plural noun can also be adopted to refer to the whole of what is 'stocked' in a speaker's mental dictionary-cum-grammar, ready for retrieval. This paper deals with the lexico-grammatical representation of stockings, in this second sense, in a way that is assumed to be in accordance with the way language users store linguistic knowledge in their grey matter--however they actually do that. I argue that stockings are ideally represented as transparent, 'patterned' (i.e. showing regularities), 'laddered' (i.e. hierarchically organized), 'stretchable' (i.e. open to creative additions), and 'netted' (i.e. showing network relations), and as either general-purpose or occasion-specific. These storage principles are illustrated with the verb one's ass off ('verb to excess') family of patterns as an example case.