leksemowi

Leksem, in linguistics, is a basic unit of the lexicon representing an abstract lexical item that can appear in multiple inflected forms. In Polish scholarly language, leksem is often equated with the term lexeme, and the form leksemowi is the dative singular of leksem, used to say “to a lexeme.” The concept focuses on the unit’s meaning, syntactic behavior, and potential senses rather than any single word form.

A leksem encodes core meaning and grammatical properties that can be realized in different word forms. For example, the Polish noun kot (cat) has inflected forms such as kota, kotowi, or kotem; all of these realizations belong to the same leksem. Similarly, a verb like pisać (to write) has multiple surface forms (piszę, piszesz, pisał), which are manifestations of one leksem. A leksem may harbour several senses that are related under the same lexical item.

Relation to lemmas, forms, and processing: in many frameworks the lemma is the canonical or dictionary form associated with a leksem, used for indexing and entry organization. The term leksem emphasizes the abstract unit across inflections, while a lemma is often the tangible headword chosen for reference. In natural language processing and corpus linguistics, lemmatization maps tokens to their leksem to normalize variants and analyze meaning beyond surface forms.

Usage and variation: the term leksem is standard in Polish linguistics and is frequently discussed alongside lexeme, lemma, and sense. Definitions vary slightly among schools of thought, but the central idea remains: a leksem is the abstract lexical unit that unites all morphologically related forms of a word under a single meaning area.