Lexicalist hypothesis


Lexicalist hypothesis is a hypothesis, proposed by Noam Chomsky, in which he claims that syntactic transformations only can operate on syntactic constituents. Lexicalist hypothesis is a response to generative semanticians who use transformations in the derivation of complex words.
There are two versions of lexicalist hypothesis: the weak version and the strong version. In weak version the transformations could not operate on the derivational words; and in strong version, the transformations could not operate on both derivational and inflectional words.
There are objections to the hypothesis such as distributed morphology.
The Lexical Integrity Hypothesis is a subset of the Lexicalist Hypothesis.