leksi

Leiksi is the Finnish term for lexis, the set of words and fixed expressions that constitute the vocabulary of a language. In linguistics, lexis encompasses not only individual words but also multiword units such as collocations, idioms, and other lexical chunks that function as single units in meaning and use. The lexis of a language includes the inventory of lexical items and their forms, as well as the relationships among them, such as synonyms, antonyms, and hypernyms.

Origin and usage: The concept of lexis derives from the broader term lexis, with the word itself used in Finnish linguistic practice to describe the vocabulary component of language alongside grammar and syntax. Researchers may distinguish lexis from grammar, treating it as the store of vocabulary and fixed expressions a speaker can draw upon in communication.

Components and structure: A lexical item can be a single word or a frozen phrase. Each item can have one or more forms through inflection or derivation; the base form is often called the lemma. Lexical knowledge also includes information about meaning, usage, and collocations. Lexical semantics studies how words convey meaning, while collocation studies examine common word pairings and their predictability.

Applications: In language teaching, developing a strong lexis is central to communicative competence. In computational linguistics, lexis informs lexical resources, dictionaries, and lexicon-based analyses, contributing to tasks such as word sense disambiguation and natural language understanding. Lexical data are typically gathered from corpora and frequency lists.

Resources and scope: Lexical resources include dictionaries, thesauri, timed lexical databases, and corpus-based frequency lists. For Finnish and other languages, language-specific corpora and lexicons support research and practical applications in education, translation, and language technologies.