The basic premise of the Lexicalist Hypothesis as suggested by Chomsky [Chomsky, Noam, 1970, “Remarks on Nominalization”, in Jacobs, R. And Rosenbaum P., eds., “Readings in English Transformational Grammar”, Ginn, Massachusetts, pp. 184-221] was the independence of syntax and word structure. In its strongest form, one might interpret this as the hypothesis that (1) Syntactic rules cannot make reference to any aspects of word-internal structure.
- Anderson (2004a), Pag. 230

The content of the Lexicalist Hypothesis, and of much recent work in syntax, rests on the assumption that the internal structure of words is not in fact created by syntactic principles, and indeed that it is not even accessible to these principles.
- Anderson (2004a), Pag. 250