Lexikalt

Lexikalt is a theoretical construct in linguistics that describes a proposed link between the lexicon and syntax. In this view, lexical entries are not merely lists of meanings and subcategorization frames, but carry syntactic templates and interface constraints that condition how words combine and how phrases are formed. The term, which blends “lexicon” with a suffix signaling a grammatical category, is used in a minority of theoretical discussions to capture the idea that lexical choice can exert systematic influence on word order and argument structure beyond conventional subcategorization.

Core ideas include lexical templates that specify permissible syntactic positions for a word, and interface constraints that govern how lexical properties such as transitivity, argument structure, and distributivity interface with syntactic structure. Lexikalt posits that the grammar is a dynamic system where the lexicon and syntax interact bidirectionally, with corpora reflecting both lexical inventories and syntactic patterns across languages.

Applications of the idea appear primarily in theoretical linguistics and, to a lesser extent, in computational linguistics, where lexical-syntactic annotations and parsing models aim to incorporate lexical templates to improve predictions of word order and agreement. It is also discussed in typology as a way to account for cross-linguistic variation in argument realization.

Reception is mixed. Critics argue that the approach can blur the line between lexicon and grammar and that empirical support remains limited, with overlaps with existing frameworks such as Construction Grammar, Lexical-Functional Grammar, and other interface theories.

See also: Lexicon, Syntax, Construction grammar, Subcategorization, Interface theory.