there are three main hypotheses regarding the syntactic categories of words. the first one is the "strong lexical" hypothesis, which states that verbs and nouns are inherent in nature, and when a word such as "walk" in english can surface as either a noun or a verb, depending on the speaker's intuitions of what the meaning of the verb is. this means that the root "walk" in english has two separate lexical entries:walk n <[ap]>