Lexicalist Hypothesis

The Lexicalist Hypothesis is a linguistic theory suggesting that the core meanings and structures of words are stored primarily in the mental lexicon (the brain's mental dictionary). According to this view, words are basic units with fixed meanings and internal structures, and these stored forms guide how words combine in sentences. This approach emphasizes that much of language's complexity arises from these stored lexical representations, rather than rules applying independently at the sentence level. Essentially, it posits that the mental storage of words themselves contains detailed information necessary for language understanding and production.